❛ Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes. ❜ (from evie @blademinded)
The world spends far more time than it ought to trying to dictate who and what might be considered pretty, smart or beautiful. It tells girls that they must act a certain way if they want to love and be loved in return. Life wasn’t about love, or even about prettiness - it was about the fight to emerge at the other side. Battered, bruised but victorious. Anne fidgets as she tends to when things grew uncomfortable and there’s a small sinking in the pit of her gut.
Something tells her that she ought have some smart or pretty words to ease the ache of it, but she thinks back on when she’d first arrived to Nassau, newly married and clinging to something trying to masquerade as love with her dreams dancing before her nose like little tidbits she would never catch. Freedom only means something if you don’t feel caged.
“Fuck them,” she says, leaning against the mottled wood of the bar and fixing the Englishwoman with a grin. “Next time someone calls ye pretty, tell ‘em where to shove it. Ain’t nothin’ ugly about you, neither. Thing about how people look’at ‘emselves, is it’s always with a critical eye. First person who ought be callin’ ye pretty is yersel’. Try it, sometime. Hold yer head high ‘n stop givin’ a shite about people’s words.” / @blademinded
