Iridescent

One

"The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time."

- W.B. Yeats

Her name was Althea.

Not Althea as in the magical marsmallow plant with healing powers from Greek mythology; she can't even begin to vouch for how many times she's been teased in relation to that, or even Althea Gibson, the famous tennis player from the 1950's, although she wished she endowed at least one athletic bone in her body.

No, just Althea, she would say.

Just plain, boring, and painfully normal Althea Richards, who wobbled in any pair of heels, consumed cookies as if it were her life line, and couldn't take a compliment to save her life. Althea Richards was boring, there was no question or lingering doubt about that, and she often found herself wondering if there really was anything special to her. 

Althea Richards hated the rain. She loathed change but at the same time, couldn't stand normalcy, and anything flavored vanilla became her best friend. She loved jackets and coats and sweaters, but hated the feeling of being too warm - it made her nauseous. She loved words but could not stand grammar, and was the slowest reader that anyone had ever come across. She was indecisive and often times crude, and was not one to take a joke easily. She was sensitive and cried when she got frustrated, and she hated crying - feeling vulnerable and lost and confused did not suit her, and she was the worst when it came to remembering important information. She was ridiculously clumsy and would stutter when she got nervous, and she was not good under pressure. She was horrible when it came to meeting new people, and she was messy and disorganized, always coming up with an excuse as to why she could not get something done.

Althea Richards was a mess of frizzy hair and bleary almond-shaped eyes, and there was not a single thing that she liked about herself.

She blinked at herself through the fogged up mirror, leaning forwards and over the sink slightly to get a better look at her rugged features. An arm held her blue towel in place over her damp body as she shivered slightly under the light breeze, while the single air vent above her head hummed gently to the sound of the shower's draining water.

Her hair was splayed across her shoulders as they lay in dripping ringlets; droplets of water splashed to the ground almost every four seconds, she counted, and goosebumps rose against her lukewarm skin as miniature marbles of water trickled down her back, as if the finger of a ghost traced up and down her spine.

Althea frowned at her reflection as she studied her features; her eyes were too narrow and her eyelashes were too short, her eyebrow hairs grew back way too quickly and her chin was the graveyard for acne scars. Her nose was dotted with uneven patches of skin, some were light and some were dark, and her forehead was always too shiny.

She wrapped the end of her towel that she was holding around her body tighter before she tucked the edge in between her breasts, and she set to work; she dragged open one of many drawers that decorated the base of her bathroom's sink, and she rummaged around, fishing out everything from tweezers to those thin and tiny cosmetic scissors, to acne cream and chapstick. 

Her fingers shook slightly as they wrapped around the silver tweezers, and she felt almost no pain whatsoever as she began to even out her eyebrows. She plucked and prodded around until she was satisified, and she studied her eyebrows before her view dropped to the rest of her complexion, and then she set off to work again.

Althea dotted her skin with creamy white dots, rubbing them into her skin only after her face resembled a massive connect-the-dots page. Her skin grew taut as the cream began to dry under the cooler atmosphere, and the pad of her index finger was stiff as a thin layer of the cream had hardened over it, and she ran her hands under warm water from the sink before shaking them dry.

She dried her hair, running her towel through the tangled and damp mess before she began to shake her head around, allowing a spray of water droplets to flick around, their impact upon the plastic curtains of her shower resembling the sound of small firecrackers that were lit almost yearly upon the patriotic celebration of the 4th of July.

Her towel dropped to the blue and white tiled floor, and she stood naked and exposed as she began to hurriedly clothe herself. She avoided her reflection at all costs, and with her back turned to the mirror, she suddenly wished that its surface were foggy again.

Mirrors are merely sheets of glass, but you are much more than that - she had read somewhere online once. She scoffed, disagreeing with the short, sweet, and soothing poem wholeheartedly; while mirrors are merely sheets of glass - she believed - those shiny, polished sheets of glass reflected what was really there, what was reflected, what was true about the image. 

Althea didn't like what was reflected back at her when she looked into the mirror; she saw an image of vulnerability, of self-loathing, and of utter lonesomeness. 

She swallowed harshly, blinking repeatedly to avoid the threat that her tears played on her eyes, and in a fuss, she finished clothing herself before she threw open her bathroom door and stalked out, not bothering with the dewy towel which lay limply in a dank heap. 

Her bare feet carried her across the wooden floor of her small and cozy apartment to the soft and carpeted floor of her cramped bedroom. She skillfully stepped over piles of nonentities that were strewn all across her room in a disorganized mess, as they had been organized into categorized piles from magazines to notebooks, and CD's to books. Her clean laundy lay in a heap in one pile on one side of the room while her worn clothes lay in another, and she didn't even bother with a second thought as she tossed the sweatpants and old high school t-shirt she had been wearing prior to her shower into the in-need-of-a-wash pile.

Althea flopped onto her unmade bed, letting out a groan as something pointy poked at her side from underneath the sheets. Her fingers wrapped around a DVD case and she flung it to the side, not bothering to see where it landed. Her eyes wandered over to the big window that sat in the upper right corner of her room, and she shimmied up along the sheets before her head hit her pillow, and she laid on her side, taking in the purple horizon just above the roof of the office building from across her apartment complex.

She studied the dimmed street lamps as they flickered to life beneath the cloudless evening sky, and she skimmed over the streets as taxies stopped and went from cubside to curbside, picking up and dropping off a plethora of different people.

Her mind scurried from thought to thought, and she suddenly found herself yearning for the stranger of a man in that beige jacket to step out from a yellow taxi car before looking up at her apartment complex as if he just knew, and send a reassuring smile her way. 

Althea chastised herself as she refocused on the breathing and blooming city just outside her window, but she soon found herself drifting off into a dreamless oblivion, hoping to see the stranger's heart-warming smile once more.

                                                         -:-:- 

a/n; 

sorry for the abrupt ending, i am so bad with closing up chapters, sdksdkjsd.

i hope you enjoyed the first chapter of iridescent!!! i'll be alternating chapters between the two characters, althea and lincoln, so the next chapter will focus more on lincoln, yay!!

this story is very very important and dear to me; it's about learning to love yourself and finding a way to be happy with the person who you are and who you're meant to be, and the feedback i've gotten so far honestly means so so so much, i can not thank you all enough.

dedicated to lennon bc she's absolutely wonderful and her comments make me laugh and cry at the same time, and i honestly don't think there's another friend out there who's as dear to me as she is. (did that even make sense???) but yeah, ily lennon!!!

pls comment below and show this story some love.

thank you for reading!

much love; f