She walked to school alone as she did every morning. Her eyes scanning the horizon and street corners as they did every morning, her nerves on edge as they were every morning. Her life was a repetition of fear, a cycle of watching and waiting yet being caught off guard by those who pursued her, those who deemed her unworthy of their time yet who spent inordinate amounts of it chasing after her in order to let her know just how little they thought of her.
She walked with her head down aside from the furtive scans that consumed and revealed the inner workings of her anxious thoughts. She was the girl who was always in the background yet who stood out if you looked for her. The person who no one really knew but who even the least informed students could lambast with insults. Anna was the one who attracted hatred like the pretty shy girl, yet though she was shy, she had not a trace of prettiness. She was overweight, something that drew attention to her in the world of bitches and princesses that is a North Shore Girls’ school.
She had been the target of everyone and such constant abuse made her a shell of a person. Ever on edge, ever fearful of what lay behind each corner she found solace only inside herself, in her fears and the confines of her anxiety. It was a world of self-hatred, of loathing and the almost destructive wish to be someone else, somewhere else, something, anything, anything but what she was.
The mirror. The faces of her mother and father. The faces and the words of those she schooled with. Her teachers. Everything, everyone, all that existed in the tiny realm she envisioned as the world, all of it reflected back to her the self-hatred she was filled with even in her dreams. Dreams that rarely offered any respite from the waking world that had so infused itself into her being that she was nothing without it. It now defined her, structured her every movement and thought. She was what they wanted her to be and to be anything else was beyond her, lost in the realm of fantasy and accessible only through freak action.
Such was the life Anna Ferren.
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Wants, Tightrope, Spilt Milk
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