Mess You Made

18.

Malibu.

They first put me into counselling when I was eleven.

I'd gotten into an argument with a teacher about something mundane but I'd shown more attitude than necessary. She was quick to write me off as my brother's carbon copy and castigate me as a bad kid without much hesitation.

I got accustomed to it afterwards, even though I didn't understand why she hated me so easily. My brother had left a bad trail, my family had a reputation and I was only a prophecy that was to be fulfilled, exactly like theirs. That time, when I was eleven — I was definitely annoying. I definitely had attitude that shouldn't have been there. But a single instance shouldn't have dictated how teachers perceived me well after the fact. It wouldn't have, if they didn't see Cristian as notorious for getting caught up in the wrong things and my mother for what she was.

I was another rotten apple, and I didn't care to throw a pity party for myself. Sierra never understood. She always convinced me to try and be better, to impress those older than us, but I knew early on that it wasn't about convincing. It wasn't about making an impression, their minds would never change so I never bothered.

I had this irremovable stain on me. It was all anyone ever saw. It was all I was accustomed to.

I don't know if my attitude got worse because of that sweet need to rebel, but it did, slowly, just get worse. I learnt how to use my tongue to berate people and bring them down before they could dare reach me. Learnt to swear, and fight, and use every mechanism possible to seem unapproachable, and exactly like I was born on the wrong side of the tracks.

It worked.

Nobody batted an eye. Not once.

It worked so flawlessly so I just kept doing it.

The only place, ever, where I wasn't doing any of that was ballet.

There wasn't a fire burning inside me. There wasn't a million set of eyes anticipating me to fail. No dirty reputation. There was beauty. It was the only place, really, that I wasn't bad or naughty or rotten and destined to be disgusting. I was something else. Something freer. A different version of myself because ballet allowed me to be higher than who I really am, allowed me to be graceful when all anyone deemed me as was brutal, and wrong. I ran to ballet. It was my only haven and I doted on nothing more.

Think it's because ballet felt like the only thing in the world that didn't judge me. Felt like— she loved me unconditionally. I could do the worst things imaginable, and her arms were always open for me to run into. I dreamed of going to see Edgar Degas' renowned paintings of ballerinas before I ever dreamed of anything else. I begged papai to take us to France to Musée d'Orsay to see them, and Cris would always make a weird face because he wanted to go to Tokyo for the racing circuits.

My childhood was always dysfunctional and unusual and never centred on myself. There were always so many things I couldn't make sense of. For a child like me, I always just ran straight to ballet because the world became clearer through arabesques and with every pas de bourrée. The world wasn't so foreign anymore if I was dancing, everything fell into place.

It was all I had, all I fucking had where I wasn't a bitch, where I didn't want to light myself on fire, where I could have a brief reprieve of being calm and at ease — then, I gave up my expensive ballet lessons, the ones papai could barely afford but prioritised just for me at the Amory dance schools. I gave them up to help redirect the money for Maya's therapy.

The arms I always ran into had closed. Nobody understood, nobody knew what it did to my head. I never mentioned and never said it aloud because Maya was the priority but the only thing I was so dependent on, I had to leave her — and I think that's where it all went worse. Without realising, I began desperately looking for different avenues after I was fifteen.