Clockwork

HESTIA

WHAT THE WORLD DOES TO girls like Hestia is absolutely horrifying.

This world, with its jagged teeth and snarling lungs, puts pretty little bows on the ugly things and disguises itself, appearing wonderful and joyous. 

They put sunshine where there should be gaping holes and chasms in the corners of the earth. Oh, and the monsters that roam this earth; they call themselves humans, but their teeth that hook themselves into your flesh when you are not careful say otherwise.

Appearances, it seems, are all this world cares about, all it deems important - why dig down deep when all it has to do is look on the surface?

Hestia stands in the bathroom and glares at her reflection for a long time. 

She has never hated herself more than this moment. Than in this tiny moment, this little pocket of time in which she is trapped, clawing at the ribbons of time with an ache to stop, to just stop this mad existence.

For what is the point of being if there is no one to document it? 

Hestia smiles gruesomely, watching the pallor of her heart shaped face twist itself into a biting grin full of pessimism and bitterness and anger and self-hatred.

(She's had many years to perfect the look.)

Her tan hands look like abominations against the white sink, gripping the ceramic bowl with the strength of a thousand years, constantly ebbing and draining with the passage of time. Her toes are spindly, spidery things that barely exist; blink too fast and she thinks that you might miss them. Her hair hangs thin around her face, curling about her neck, drip drip dripping with water, greasy in the shitty bathroom lights.

She looks young sure, youthful even; in the mortal world they call her sixteen and eighteen, despite her several millennium of life upon this earth. It's what she hates. That time has effect on everyone but her.

Time is ticking bomb, this is something she has known ever since the first years, that time is precious and not to be wasted. 

She finds it absolutely hilarious that time is something all mortals value, yet it is something all of them squander, watching the grains of minutes slip through the cracks in their weathered fingers.

Her limbs are frail but not frail enough, thin but not thin enough, petite but not petite enough, and it's a vicious cycle of standards that can never be met, standards that are just out of reach, standards that kill than allow them to live.

She constantly watches. What she does, what she eats, what she says. She watches it all. A silent participant in the race of life. 

Laying in the background, forgotten -- always forgotten. Never remembered.

Compartmentalize, she used to tell herself. Compartmentalize and package and push down deep until you forget that the world is a grotesque place with beasts prowling the streets.

But there comes a point in time when walls crash and things collide and it's so so difficult to disengage, to untangle the horrific mess that resides deep in her bones. 

Girls like Hestia are walking catastrophes -- they attempt to squeeze themselves into little boxes, regardless of limbs or extraneous digits, all too desperate to fit neatly. They destroy themselves from the inside out, ripping the fight right out of their lungs before it even begins, before it even matters.

And when it is time for the final struggle, girls like Hestia will always lose because that is what they have conditioned themselves to do. 

That is what they have trained themselves to do. Submit themselves to pain, to lose and lose until they have nothing left to give, and for what? 

For a mere image.

She looks at herself in the mirror, sneering. 

(Oh, how she hates what she has become.)

Hestia grabs the bottle of pills hiding behind the counter.

She counts out the pills, one by one.

One. 

Girls like Hestia will never realize that life doesn't fit into neat little boxes. 

Two. 

Girls like Hestia will never realize that when you try to cram yourself into a neat little box, everything eventually explodes and implodes and collapses in on itself. A homegrown nebula - a disaster of your own creation. 

Three. 

Girls like Hestia will never realize that they cannot forget, that they cannot stop, that they should've never begun to begin with. 

Hestia downs the pills, enjoying the sensation of floating, of numbness, of not feeling. 

Girls like Hestia, they will die before they can realize any of those things -- Hestia, on the other hand, can die a thousand times over and yet still know better, can still forge a different path. 

She just chooses not to.