Prompt Challenge #2 7/1/18
Prompt supplied by @coffin-prompts and sent to me once again by @melindawrites thanks for pushing me back into writing.
Prompt: There are bullets between the eyes of the people who have touched her.
I went a little off kilter from the prompt but this is what I came up with. I apologize for the low quality.
She sat in front of the small fire on her front porch steps, head in her hands, letting the warmth spill over her. The events of an hour ago swirled between her ears as she choked up pain and a fucked up sense of guilt that she knew didn’t belong but carried with her nonetheless. She just knew it was her fault, some way, somehow. The wall she had built up between her ribcage and fractured heart had served its purpose, but at what cost? Another man had walked out her door, after taking up space in her chest for months, and sneaking in little moments to strip off pieces of her porcelain skin bit by bit only to look inside and find out he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw. She had worked for years to hide away her secrets, to usher the past and the scars it brought with it into a dark little corner of her insides. She always viewed herself as broken, something in orbit that had gone off axis. She was losing control and losing everyone she loved along with it.
When she was 8, she watched her father beat her mother to a pulp, all while sitting on the ground, hands on her knees, begging and crying for it to stop. It didn’t. This was what she knew of love.
When she was 13, a boy in her class cornered her in the girls bathroom and touched her inappropriately. He threatened to kill her if she told anyone. She had pushed this so far down, it was only brought to light again a few weeks ago at a therapy session. She now knows this is when she first developed PTSD and yet another distorted idea of how a girl deserves to be treated.
When she was 18 and a freshman in college, she met a boy who helped her see something inside of herself she had forgotten was there: beauty. Not just any kind of beauty either. A beauty that surpasses just the physical, but a beauty of the heart and mind. He told her he had never met anyone like her before; that he had never met a girl that lived with such fire. A few months later he doused that same fire when alcohol and drugs became more important than her and the only way he knew how to show love was by accusing her of being a whore and by leaving his handprint across her bare back and throat. It was then she remembered her parents and the love she had known growing up. Maybe she deserved it. It took her best friend witnessing the abuse to wrench her out of his grip.
Boy after boy had came and went since then, each with a promise of treating her right, but each leaving with a fragment of her very being just the same. Sometimes she would catch herself wondering what had happened to each one of them, only to quickly snap back to reality as she would attempt to assure herself she was better off without them.
The truth is, love is fucked up. People are even more fucked up. But how can we be so sure of what we truly deserve without having first seen the evil and ugliness behind people’s eyes? She was beginning to learn that true love isn’t giving all of yourself to someone else, because then what do we have left?
She felt cold and empty, even as the fire raged before her, but for the first time in her life, she had began to understand what she deserved most of all. A tide of emotions swept over her, soothing her aching bones, and it was then she knew the purest love of all is the love one can have for one’s self.
