Suffice to say, sleep didn't come easy that night. Vanity had to have reread that damn note at least fifty times over while most would've been asleep at gone 2 in the morning. She searched tirelessly for a deeper meaning, something cryptic woven between the words to answer the questions she harboured, anything to put her out of her misery. Once or twice she even found herself praying that this whole debacle was some sort of nightmare, and at any moment she would awake to the smell of burnt bacon again, awake ten minutes late and hurriedly ready herself for another tedious day at school. But she found that the more she willed herself to awake from this hellish version of her reality she had conceived in her head, the more the soporific, deafening ticking of the wall clock in her dreary sitting room reminded her that it wasn't just some maladaptive daydream.
Her mother was in hospital teetering on the edge of life, and she was here, alone, growing positively restive from the dripping of tap water descending into a pool of unwashed dishes. She was here, alone, sitting with the television buzzing with nothing but pure static. Vanity had long since retired to the confinement of her own head and the profundity of her notions, mulling over her questions and trying desperately to rationalise everything. She couldn't come to a logical conclusion for the life of her, and it left her feeling even more wretchedly lost. There was nothing to connect. No clues or hints, hidden messages laced between lines of gibberish, nothing of the sort, only muddled nonsense about cutting ties with forgotten relations, abandoned houses in the woods and somebody going by an alias of 'Cupid'. It was hopeless. But she wanted answers.
And she had a vague idea of where to begin looking for them. She had fetched the box once more, and now found herself hunched over at the coffee table, rooting through various pictures of her mother in her youth. The lines of her juvenile beauty were gracefully captured in several photographs of the brunette, of her basking in the light of the sun, or wearing bangles and long, floral dresses in fields of daisies, or smiling modestly at the camera with the sun glinting off of her circular framed glasses, a flower crown propped up on her head. In every photo Vanity came across, the date was scribbled into the corner of the paper with the smudged ink of a silver marker. They were dated from the year 1992 all the way to 1997. Soon, she reached the last handful of photos, throughly disheartened at the lack of answers she had retrieved about the state of affairs. That is, until she came to the very last photo. Her mother was still present, as she would have expected, but there was somebody else with her. She had an arm wrapped around this woman's waist.
A strange, unnamed woman who she stood beside in the foreground. They posed ahead of a small patch of foliage, copious amounts of birch trees in the background accompanied by rose bushes which spanned across the remaining frame of the photo. This woman, she was impossibly tall and well endowed as well, as it stood. She was impressively curvy even as she was clad in a seemingly thick sweatshirt and a pair of faded blue, high waisted jeans, dwarfing her mother who was comparably much skinner. She had a bronzed complexion, no blemishing appearing on the surface of her sun kissed flesh. Masses of thick, fuchsia locks were suspended back into a high ponytail upon her head, loose coils of hair framing her features at each side of her enthralling face. The year '1996' was doodled in the corner of the Polaroid as with the rest of them.
But it was the eyes. They were like her own. Except they glowed crimson against a black sclera, shining with incandescence even on the tattered paper, bearing striking heart pupils exactly like that of her own. Was this the 'Cupid'? Or somebody in relation to them? Vanity stared, her mouth agape with awe at this woman's eyes- they had something so familiar and homely about them, like Vanity knew exactly who she was, however she felt simultaneously fictitious.
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If you were to ask Vanity what possessed her to venture into the forest alone at half three on a Friday morning, she couldn't have given you an answer. She figured that there was no time to think things through when she could be looking, doing something to ease her morbid, inexplicable curiosity for this tall woman and her smouldering eyes. And so she had changed out of her casual clothes to ready herself for her hike, into a pair of black leggings and a loose fitting shirt before tugging on the same grey hoodie she wore to school that very morning.
She secured her hair in a tight pony tail before she bundled up as many things as she could fit into her tiny backpack; a clean pair of clothes, the note, her phone, a charger, keys, her notebook and a pencil case. Paying her mom's bedroom one last visit, Vanity slipped a pendant she had borrowed from out of her jewellery box around her neck and crammed it underneath the fabric her hoodie, holding it close to her chest. And then she wedged the picture into her pocket, stuffed her earbuds into her ears as she hauled on her rain-sodden converse, departing her home without a second thought.
YOU ARE READING
Girl of the Unorthodox (UNDER REVISION)
General Fiction((POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING: mentions overdosing, strong detailed violence, occasional elements of gore and angst, please read at one's own discretion)) EDIT: TWs still apply. i haven't touched this pile of shit since last year so i'm revisiting it...
