Feed the Muse: Twenty-Four (Vol. III) [√]

[ the girl with the snake tattoo ]

The girl with the snake tattoo turns 24 in a couple of weeks.

Like with all things in her life, it doesn't give her much pleasure to know that she'll be turning a year older, not with all the weight of the lives she's not living a heavy, suffocating prism inside her chest. She feels ancient in her twenty-something physicality, a form molded by gravity and restricted by the mundane etiquette of what it means to be human. Such a weak, feeble creature. Reckless in its pursue of gold yet clueless as to the value once it has the jewel in its grasp. It pains her to not understand the mechanisms of why people have to suffer for the good things. Patience was never her virtue.

The girl with the snake tattoo often disassociates from the reality, and if another year means another 365 days around the sun, then it can only mean 80% of her revolutionary existence stays inside her convoluted, poisonous mind. Venom, that's what she wanted to spit out, whenever somebody asks about the tattoo on her arm.

"Why a snake?"

"It's an ouroboros."

"An ouro-what?"

"It's an ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail."

"Why would you choose something like that?"

She wanted her second tattoo to be grotesque yet abstract. Her own secret, supposedly. People asking the meaning behind that tattoo seemed like an intrusion of privacy, a hard-limit, one she attempts to answer with a blank stare. She was learning to put up boundaries behind her one thousand walls. As if she needed another barrier of protection from the world that wanted her vulnerable and aching. She didn't want to ache. She didn't want to be a carrier of the phantom pain that seeps from a forgotten wound. She didn't want to live a life of misery and aloofness and isolation. But she doesn't know how to do anything else.

The ouroboros was a symbol of an everlasting rebirth and yet the girl was no longer a believer of eternity. Only a cynical sense of chaos that came from being the master of your own fate. The philosophy behind self-destruction was appealing to her rotten idealisms. The girl wanted her anger permanent on her skin, some kind of proof that she was not any better than the creature on her arm. It strikes when it feels the threat, fangs flashing in warning before puncturing the flesh of its victim. The girl is ferocious if let loose. A feral beast that feeds on the darker emotions of the heart. She wasn't tame, no. And she needed no owner to hold her leash.

She wonders how she held on for so long on this earth, when she felt only devastation and grief. A walking corpse on a sunlit path. You'll never mistake her for anything but good. She knew how to hide her demons well enough to bring them around. The impulses in her system a slow burn, accumulating until the bottle tips over and she screams into her sleep. The nightmares are everywhere. The blood seems to be more potent, lingering in the air, daunting and deadly and dangerous. The girl didn't fear. She felt indestructible in her despair. People don't have the patience for sad people. So she becomes a ghost instead.

The girl with the snake tattoo, like all the other birthdays that have passed with malice, has only one secret wish. And unlike everything else, this one is soft and warm in its metaphors. She could only afford to show this amount of vulnerability for the world swallows people who have their hearts sewn on their sleeves.

The girl with the snake tattoo lost hers a little too soon. She doesn't have anything to lose.

Not anymore.