𝘚𝘛𝘈𝘙𝘎𝘐𝘙𝘓, 𝙇𝙊𝙍𝙀𝙉𝙕𝙊 𝘽𝙀𝙍𝙆𝙎𝙃𝙄𝙍𝙀

forever ?

hold you tight ,
squeeze you right,
give you all I've got !

CLEODORA SINCLAIR

I was ecstatic—no, not the featherlight, bubblegum ecstasy they write about in adolescent diaries—but a feverish, tight-chested delirium that prickled beneath my skin like pins dipped in arsenic. Enzo finally liked me. Genuinely, I believed. Though belief, I've learned, is a fragile thing—porcelain-thin, with hairline fractures invisible until it shatters. It wasn't the first time he had fooled me, nor the second. Perhaps fooling was his native tongue, and I, like a desperate linguist, was determined to translate affection from deception.

I stared at the bracelet shackled around my wrist, its delicate chain biting faint crescents into my skin. "You've belonged to me," he had smiled, the words slick and warm, like honey poured over broken glass. They replayed in my head on an endless loop, a cruel phonograph needle scratching at the same tender groove. My tanned cheeks betrayed me, flushing a tender, humiliating pink—proof that even my body was a traitor to my reason. It was impossible, absurd even, that I—the girl he's despised since first year —could be the object of his affection.

That night, sleep evaded me like a guilty conscience. I tossed and turned, my sheets twisted around my limbs like the aftermath of some invisible struggle. Giggles bubbled up from a place I didn't recognize—feral, girlish sounds that felt alien in the dark, like echoes from someone else's mouth. The walls of my room seemed to shrink with every thought of him, pressing inward, heavy with invisible hands.

Onyx and Lucille must've thought I was mad. Perhaps I was. There's a thin seam between love and lunacy, stitched tightly with threads of obsession, and I was tugging at it with both hands.

But I didn't care. I was prepared for anything. I felt unstoppable—like I could swallow fire, bleed poetry, tear through the fragile membrane of reality with my bare hands. And if it all burned down around me? Let it. I would stand in the ashes, giggling mindlessly like I am now.

౨ৎ

After hours of tossing and turning, tangled in the fever-dream remnants of restless sleep, dawn finally bled its thin, pale light across my ceiling. School. The word felt foreign and inconsequential compared to the riot of thoughts thrumming beneath my skin. I flung myself out of bed, the cold floor shocking against my bare feet, while Onyx groaned from the corner, her
tired moan a low, grating thing, like the slow creak of rusted hinges.

I drifted to the mirror, its glass smeared faintly with fingerprints and dust, a fragile portal to my own reflection. And there she was—I was—gazing back with eyes that no longer seemed ravenous for flaw. For the first time, I didn't feel the familiar itch to dissect myself, to unravel my face like a poorly stitched seam, thread by unforgiving thread. I didn't crave the small, cruel comforts of self-critique, didn't avert my gaze as if my own features were an unbearable burden. No. For the first time, I was whole—not perfect, not radiant, but whole. There was a quiet, fragile contentment nestling in my chest, as foreign as a language I'd never learned but somehow understood.

"Why are you up so early?" Lucille's voice tore through the delicate hush, thick with sleep and irritation, her whine curling around the words like ivy. She was crumpled beneath a mountain of blankets, her face half-buried, limbs sprawled like she'd fallen from the sky and landed wrong. Of course, Lucille wouldn't understand such things—things that thrummed beneath the surface like undercurrents pulling at your ribs. To her, morning was just an inconvenience, not a revelation.

"It's not even early," I murmured, the words slipping out like an afterthought, a small dismissal cast over my shoulder as I ran a finger down the cool glass of the mirror, tracing the outline of my own face as if to confirm it was still there.