You Fooled Me Once with Your Eyes now, Honey
She was like a ghost. Everywhere Ava went, she went with a haze of fog, like she wasn't completely there and neither was anyone else.
But if only they would have watched her, they would have seen the beauty in everything Ava did.
There was magic in the way she could tear free of her bones, walk in the air, between the raindrops, through herself, and then back again. It was an art the way she could step outside her body and be free for mere snapshots of time.
No one saw that in her.
Because no one really saw Ava.
They never notice the contrasts of white on white. The pale skin holding her prisoner didn't stand out, because Ava herself was the whitespace. It was like she was the background of all the pictures while everyone else was the focal point. When she was around the picture looked poised and balanced. Finished. When she was gone, there was something wrong. Something that no one could put their finger on. Something no one bothered to look for.
As she got older, Ava started being gone a lot more often, and her absence was hard to ignore. The pictures started looking strange. Incomplete.
But no one ever questioned why.
Then, on the rare occasions when she'd come back around, the contrast would be so painful that people simply ignored it.
I ignored it.
No one wanted to believe anything was wrong. She was a good girl and good girls were supposed to make bad liars. I guess that was just a lie the good girls made up so no one would wonder.
Ava was a gorgeous liar. The fabrications slipped off her tongue and through her lips like she was reading poetry. Stories danced out of her throat like dandelions bending to a breeze as she filled our heads with fairy tales of the life she pretended to live.
It was part of what made her a masterpiece.
Ava was a twisted paradox of the loveliest sorts. She was beautiful in her weird ways right up until the pretty little mask suddenly didn't fit anymore.
That happened so fast.
One day I, like everyone else, believed in the toothless grin she flashed and the loud laughs she forced. I believed that she was a happy little girl, content to be the quiet force behind everything she did and the ever important, forgotten whitespace everywhere she went.
Then, I woke up one evening to realize what everyone else had begun to: Ava was nothing but skin and bones. We all started to see the way her skin would crawl and shiver in the summer sun. We noticed how the blonde waves of hair started getting thinner and thinner and the clothes started getting loser and loser.
Yet we all kept believing in the painted smiles. Ava was too small to feel anything bigger than she was. It looked like she was perfectly happy and completely numb.
But she wasn't.
She was screaming for help so loud that no one heard her. We covered our ears and walked away, thinking she was a good girl. She could handle herself.
But slowly the screams started to chip away at my insides until I couldn't stand it anymore. Something about her pained me and I had to know why it didn't hurt her too. I had to know how she was so numb.
When I started watching, I began to see the artist at work. In a way, we had all been right; there wasn't enough room under her skin for everything she felt. So, she carved out the insides of her bones and stuffed the emotions in their hollow crevasses, hiding them from view and feeling them with her every movement until she learned a very important lesson: bones have a funny way of breaking.
And when hers finally did, they shattered.
It was terrifying when she lost control and let the façade slip.
All the little shards pinned her soul to the deteriorating muscles and starving organs under her flesh and she couldn't escape. No matter how hard she tried, she could break free and walk outside herself anymore.
Never in my life had I watched someone more miserable. I'd never seen someone break so hard and simply fall apart because they were stitched to the skin they hated.
I guess she thought that if she destroyed herself, she could escape and never have to go back. If she did it right, there wouldn't be anything to go back too.
But in the process of ruining her body, she accidentally sealed herself in, and at some point she must have given me the key. For some reason, she believed that I could be the one to help her. She had more faith in me than any Christian had ever found in God and though I could try to wear the clothes, I couldn't fill the shoes.
I was worried she would find out that I wasn't as great as she always thought me up to be. Finding that out would kill her.
She always said she was dying.
I just never knew she was serious.