Runaway

Maturity

Time was passing. She was putting up a strong front but it was cracking. 

Her hips were growing wider. Her limbs were growing longer. The blue in her eyes were growing colder. Yet somehow bluer. It was still a curse. 

But her mind grew stronger, freer, more independent. 

Her resolve to keep living with him, keep suffering this, it was breaking. Her emotions just couldn't handle it anymore. Her heart had had too much. Too much of satisfying his base appetites and shallow desires. Too much of being his bedwarmer and his party favour and his ornament and his whore.  

And also she was growing stronger. He soul was finding the courage to rebel. 

She was more confident in her own thoughts, in her own desires now. 

This perhaps is how we can tell that she was truely growing and maturing. She was becoming more unapologetically confident with her desires and her observations. She was learning not to force herself to accept the truth presented before her but rather to think for herself and find her own truth. 

This was a slow process. A gradual process silently seeping in between muffled cries and longing sighs and heart-stopping terror. 

It required an incredible amount of strength. Strength she didn't know she had. An amount of strength that came from many sources. 

The first was empathy. He was anything but faithful. A few months into their marriage he started going out more. Staying out all night. Coming home with lipstick smothered on his collar, on his neck. It made her cry at first. When she was young and didn't know what to make of it. 

But as the years went on she realized that the other girls he slept with were in the same position as her. Just because they were not married to him didn't mean they were in a position where they could really deny him or in a position where they knew that they should. They were just like her. Just girls, other girls. Just people who had been told by society that they couldn't deny men, that they had to fulfill all their desires. 

They'd been told by society that any male attention should be cherished and that if he wants you even for the briefest moment you must hand yourself over. 

Just like she had been. 

They were all on the same damned boat and they were all ashes from the same damned fireplace. 

She felt bad for them. It was one thing to let herself be crumbled in his hands. It was another thing to let other people share her fate. Other people who had other lives, people who had their own emotions and their own silenced, aching souls. Their own stories. 

Slowly, surely, she came to realize that if accepting society dogma meant accepting the abuse of infinite people, she would not do it. 

At first she beat herself up over the fact that she put a bunch of girls higher than her husband. But her heart, her sense of - you could call it sisterhood - would not let her condone his actions towards them. It became a breakthrough for her. 

And since she condemned his behaviour towards other girls, she came to condemn it when he showed the exact same behaviour towards her. 

Another thing that caused her to rebel was that it just hurt too much to be silent. It just hurt too much to be stuck in this cycle. She just couldn't take it anymore. She just could no longer stop herself from hating him, for hating the world's hierarchies, from hating the system. 

And she got older. Entered adulthood. Growing maturity means growing confidence. It means growing sure of yourself. And she wasn't the gullible little girl she used to be. She was an aching and desperate young woman. 

She knew that she could think for herself, feel for herself, know for herself. What she thought about what was right, what was just, what was happiness, what was love, she knew it was trustable. 

More trustable than what society told her. More trustable than what the authorities and the parents and the books told her. Her own heart, her own mind, it was more trustable than people who claimed to be her people. 

If she thought, felt, knew that the older man she slept with many nights was a monster who did not love her, or anyone, and never would, she trusted those thoughts. She knew she was right. 

She couldn't stay here. She had to leave. She had to leave. She had to leave. But she couldn't let him just replace her with another poor girl. Perhaps fresh-faced and full of childish innocence as she once was.

She couldn't let him live. 

And it was at this moment the brilliant hope that was carried by the summer skies entered the blueness of her eyes. She'd only be free of him if she killed him. So she would. 

He wasn't the  type of person who deserved to live.