Adapting
Mar 23, 2015 10:57:33 GMT -5
Post by styg on Mar 23, 2015 10:57:33 GMT -5
All is dark...
...well, that's not quite right. The room is dark, certainly, but blinding white light streams through the high net-curtained window, sucking the life from colours and casting in shadowed streams the young woman sitting upright at a small round table. She tilts her head to speak, demurely yet somehow imperiously, and porcelain skin gleams like a spectre beyond the rips in the dirty veil covering her face.
"I'd have feared you once, Darwin."
Her tone is one of empty resignation.
"The little lost girl in the calavera makeup in the front row at GEW events all those years ago? She would have backed away from you, eyes wide and trembling. She'd have run to Phreak or Klown and begged them to protect her from you."
Does she shiver, or is it a trick of the unearthly glow around her?
"She would have cowered at your feet, frail and confused before your might, your aggression, your dedication to a purpose so alien to her own."
She bows her head.
"I miss that girl, as weak as she was. But my heart doesn't mourn her, because my heart lies sleeping. The marrow in my bones births no blood cells. The strands of my DNA hang limp."
Her voice sighs like white lilies on a grave as she assesses herself - then suddenly her head rises.
"Survival of the fittest, Darwin?"
She throws back her veil to stare dead at us with scarlet pinprick pupils in cloudy white eyes.
"Survival means nothing to the dead."
--------------------------------------
...well, that's not quite right. The room is dark, certainly, but blinding white light streams through the high net-curtained window, sucking the life from colours and casting in shadowed streams the young woman sitting upright at a small round table. She tilts her head to speak, demurely yet somehow imperiously, and porcelain skin gleams like a spectre beyond the rips in the dirty veil covering her face.
"I'd have feared you once, Darwin."
Her tone is one of empty resignation.
"The little lost girl in the calavera makeup in the front row at GEW events all those years ago? She would have backed away from you, eyes wide and trembling. She'd have run to Phreak or Klown and begged them to protect her from you."
Does she shiver, or is it a trick of the unearthly glow around her?
"She would have cowered at your feet, frail and confused before your might, your aggression, your dedication to a purpose so alien to her own."
She bows her head.
"I miss that girl, as weak as she was. But my heart doesn't mourn her, because my heart lies sleeping. The marrow in my bones births no blood cells. The strands of my DNA hang limp."
Her voice sighs like white lilies on a grave as she assesses herself - then suddenly her head rises.
"Survival of the fittest, Darwin?"
She throws back her veil to stare dead at us with scarlet pinprick pupils in cloudy white eyes.
"Survival means nothing to the dead."
--------------------------------------
She pitied the people who told her "other people have it worse" whenever she said something even passingly negative. They meant to inspire her, she understood; their naivety was almost touching. To young Jordan Beverly Harrington, it was simply another disgusting beautiful reminder that life is meaningless and existence is suffering.
She changed her identity with contact lenses and hair extensions for the same reason she cut her arms: to subvert something unique. Life was an unwanted gift and you could either turn it into something halfway fun or leave in a cupboard to collect dust.
Serenity made the choice. When Jordan found herself locked in that cupboard by other people, Serenity smashed the lock. In the posters on the wall of her bedroom in her parents' rotting Downtown Eastside two-storey, Jordan and Serenity both saw themselves. On stage, screaming into the mic and crunching riffs out of a guitar. Posing for magazine covers, each shoot an oasis of - this made her smile - serenity in a whirlwind of gothic debauchery. Diving from the top turnbuckle, flipping gravity the bird, being cheered on by thousands of fans.
There were a lot of wrestlers she loved, a lot whose moves she practised in the back yard with her friend Ligaya. But one was more than a favourite - one, she felt, just one, truly understood her. He was like her. A man who had seen through the veil and rubbed out the rules. A man who saw his own being and everyone else's as a twisted gleaming sandbox mode in the videogame of life.
A man who, as he stared back at her from the wall through his ghoulish green facepaint, kept fighting no matter what life threw at him because he simply did not give a fuck.
A man who wore his scars so proudly.
Phreak.
Her beautiful Phreak.[/i