Ashes on your pale skin ~ Chris Motionless

Prologue

Ripped black jeans lay upon a body which is merely skin and bone, a black hoodie flowing down the short females frame, and swamping her almost entirely.

Her pale skin is dramatised by long black hair, reaching far down her back, and covering her face largely with her overgrown bangs which she uses to hide behind the world.

Despite her bangs and the way that they cover her heavily eyeliner clad eyes, a small smile plays on her lips as she bums away softly to the music playing over the old stereo in her mothers old, banged up car.

She taps her weathered old black boots against the dusty mat on the floor softly, her mother gently tapping her chipped black painted fingernails across the steering wheel as she drives.

The music resonates with them both, cobwebs by motionless in white floods through the speakers.

It's been a good day, a somewhat good week even; but doesn't change the fact that her mothers pupils lay large within her sockets and the bruises covering her frame underneath et the large hoodie aren't visible.

She doesn't think anything can bring down her mood today though, her heart beating with the constant growing of nervousness and excitement.

She never thought what the day would come, and the idea of being in the same room as her estranged father is filling her whole body with a sense of anxiety, which she's no stranger to.

It also doesn't help that her mother raised her on his music, and it's been engraved into her head from a young age, his lyrics meaning more to her that she knows he'll ever know.

She knows she won't get to speak to him, not in the system that she wants and has craved since she was a little girl.

Even if she were to get a chance to speak to him, with his many fans most likely swamping him, he'd never believe her, and as much as she's so desperately excited to see him, she knows it's going to be incredibly bittersweet and sting like a hundred angry wasps, when she knows she's looking down in her fathers eyes, and he's just looking past her into the sea of fans.

She tries not to think too much about the hurt that will investigate face after this night fades back into her everyday routine, and things go back to being a riptide of dread and pain.

She doesn't want the fancy medication her mothers been giving her to stop, but she knows it will, she knows her mums loaned money to get them here tonight, and to take out the two week run of her narcolepsy medication that she's been needing for her whole life, but they've never been able to afford.

To be honest, she has no clue how much her medication is supposed to cost, but she does have a sinking suspicion that her mothers drug abuse problems have a lot do with her constantly empty bank balance.

She's gotten used to the empty fridges and cupboards, the cut off phones and the freezing, beaten down house with the scattered bongs, foil and empty baggies. I'm all honestly it's the only life that she's ever known, and she's never really felt 'hungry', purely because she never really realised that was was something she could feel, or was supposed to feel, it's just always been her normal.

As much as mother resents her for her medical problems, and to be honest, her existence in the first place; she still loves her, she'll always love her, because she's still her mum, and her love is all she's ever known.

She's used to being thrown about every so often, and she's used to the dark look that crosses her mums face. But she's also used to kindness that she brings, the music that they share together and the way that things used to be.

She blames her body, mostly, curses herself for being physically sick.

Her mothers always used, even when she was pregnant with her, which probably explains the way that her physical health turned out.

It was never bad though, and it seemed that the older she got, the more her mother realised how much she resented her daughter, and therefore the more she used.

She never really hurt when she was high, if anything, she looked forward to her being on whatever she was on at the time, as she was usually kinder then and also too out of it to care about her daughter at all.

She didn't really win either way. Neglectful when sober; abusive when lucid.

She hates the way that she knows that her mother almost definitely uses because she can't be around her. She tries not to think about it. She tries to plug herself into her music and let herself fade away most of the time.

She wishes for a better life, but at the same time she doesn't really know what it looks like, or what a 'normal' life looks like. The things that she wishes to change aren't even that substantial, but to her they would be.

She wants her narcolepsy and seizures to fade away, despite the impossibility of it.

Maybe that would fix things; maybe that would make her loveable, but she doubts it.

She's never know love, parental or through anyone in her life.

Shes rarely been shown kindness, frequently bullied at school because of the lurking smell of mildew and stale cigarettes lurking on her clothes. Most of the time she's used to being completely silent and letting herself fade away into the background; nobody even notices if she doesn't talk.

But despite everything, despite her not knowing if the fading bruises on her back are from her mother directly, or from her just letting her seize and not caring enough to do anything about it, despite the large pupils adorning her mothers eyes, and the lit spliff filling the car with a plume of smoke; she smiles.

And she doesn't let that smile leave her face as the pull into a parking space nest to the venue, close enough that she can even see the tour bus where her dad rests.

She smiles softly to herself, and sees a soft smile coming from her mothers lips too, as they walk towards the venue together, side by side.

-

I just wanted to say that upon starting this book, it may include triggering themes and a lot of medical based things. I am going to try my best to try and make this book accurate to the conditions I'm talking about through research, I might not always be spot on, and I do apologise for me.

Please don't take anything that I'm writing for as fiction, and take it all with a grain of salt, I am not a doctor, and therefore my depiction of certain illnesses might not be one hundred percent. I will say, though, that this book is not meant to glorify any of these illnesses at all.