Control Freak ✔️

01 save state

When the light was all gone inside of the deep blue abyss, like a dark cloth, it absorbed the colors of her skin, wiping them to the edge and letting them slowly drip from the canvas. Her entire sky was swallowed by the black ocean, until all that was left of the dwindling sunlight was stamped to dust and swept away with the waves.

She closed her eyes to sleep. More than she wanted to breathe, she wanted to sleep, and to forget herself, and to disintegrate until she became nothing. But the pain in her lungs sent her body writhing, and her face jolting to the surface. She was awake, alone in her own bathtub. The running water had begun to spill over the edge of the ivory casket.

Eventually, she uprooted herself from the cold tile, one foot at a time as she stumbled forward and latched her bony fingers to the edge of the sink. She straightened up and stood in front of the bathroom mirror, with arms to the side, and feet spread shoulder-width apart and her chin tucked in. Her brow was fixed in a studious expression. But then, she broke out of her trance and her expression suddenly brightened as she exposed her brilliant, white teeth. She wrinkled her nose and let out a modest giggle. She meticulously practiced a whole spectrum of emotions, all of which would vanish one after another as quickly as they had materialized. She adorned each one like a mask, wore it for a little while, and then discarded it without a second thought. Without blinking, she combed through a monolith of faces, and made each come alive with its own personality, as she poured into it all the learned quirks and built lucid memories in her mind to give the behaviors meaning. Then, she removed them, leaving nothing left behind as she moved onto the next.

She spent a long time looking closely into the mirror. Like a mathematician carefully plotting endpoints along a parabola, she dispassionately constructed the smile that existed as a photograph in her mind. The mask was a perfect, painted smirk. Its purring, pouting lips concealed the cold misery of loneliness carved deep in her bones. On the surface, there remained that permanent smile, not shaped by her present interactions but carved from a memory, as she pulled the flesh and muscles and the white bones beneath that manipulated her face like the wires of a white marionette. Her hair was still wet from the bath. She moved the matted strands from her forehead again.

Finally, her eyes met her reflection. She took a good, long look. Her pupils were forest green dots in the middle of her white eyes, a timid pout on her lips; a pale, lethargic face. The skin: like a shell, deadened and hard all over. The insides had been gutted out and hollowed. The remains were without warmth, misfitting and peculiar like a borrowed outfit she never asked for, to look the part of a role she never wanted to play.

She was lonely inside her skin. And lost, somewhere adrift in a canyon and no way of possibly knowing which way led home.

She retreated from the reflection, turning her vision to what was in her hand: an empty transparent orange prescription bottle. She opened the medicine cabinet and set it next to the hair dye and painkillers. She put her face in her hands. Inconsolably, she cried.

She dragged her feet back to her room and plopped back in her bed. With controller in hand, she decided to play for a little while with the volume low. If they couldn't hear her playing, they wouldn't come up and scold her for not studying, or not doing chores, or, just plain existing.

Her home screen loaded and revealed an avatar, a brighter, sunnier version of herself postured with its hands high on hips and a cocky smirk. A world was quickly built beneath the avatar's feet which resembled an idyllic metropolis, uncrowded and unpolluted. The streets were lined with storefronts, each of which had a uniform, rectangular sign posted just above its doors. The girl's avatar spent some time deciding between a couple of doors, running back and forth, before she finally entered one.