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The biggest lie she’d ever told was the truth.
It had been when she was ten and had gathered up enough courage to tell her mom that daddy wasn’t as nice as he pretended to be. She’s come to her mother in hiccups and sobs and ‘he raped me,’ the words glittering on her tongue, and she was smacked because she was a liar.
She told her mother that her husband had used her, and she was called a liar. She had been the one in the wrong. All her. Not him.
That was the first time that she learned that love was a weapon. The first time she had wished that she could be the liar she was accused of being. The first time that she had realized that whole ‘loving your family no matter what’ was complete nonsense, and that it was near impossible. Your family doesn’t choose you. They can choose to keep you, but they didn’t pick you out.
Rose had learned that love was a better offense than defense, and she had abused that for years to come. But sometimes things didn’t work out quite like she planned, because sometimes things got just a little out of hand, and sometimes she gets sent to mental hospitals because people misunderstand her behavior.
They say she’s mentally unbalanced. They tell her she needs to be on meds. They tell her she needs to be put away. She simply nods and smiles, because sure it’s money, but it’s a week that she gets to spend not worrying about anything. She gets a week to relax.
So that’s what she got to do, for the third time, three weeks ago. She went there and played nice because truly, that’s all she needed to do, and they put her on new medication in attempt to fix her.
She never bothers to tell them that they can’t fix what isn’t broken.
“So, what are you thinking about?”
And while she was having her visit, she’d met a boy named Dave. They’d exchanged information because they were allowed to do that in the grown up ward -- she was an adult now, 18, the law said so -- so that they could meet. It wasn’t anything serious. It never was. But she liked the way he carried himself and he liked that mysterious smile she always played on her face.
“I’m thinking about stardust,” she replies, and Dave just sort of laughs. There’s no stardust and moonbeams in her thoughts, but she wishes that there was. Dave’s still got the face of a teenager at nineteen, and he’s all bright red eyes that are always hidden behind a pair of shades. Rose tells him that she wishes he would take them off more often, because she loves the way they look. He laughs. She doesn’t know if he knows she’s serious.
“Stardust, huh? Are you going to start flying?” Rose can taste the smirk on his voice when he speaks, and she just rolls her eyes.
“That’s pixy dust. If I start flying, Strider, then you’ll know that you’re the one that’s flying high.”
Dave doesn’t give a response after that, and Rose doesn’t expect one.
She has her body draped across the whole small brown couch, blonde hair spilling out onto the cushion as she stares at the ceiling, mentally picking out pictures in the white texture. She thinks she sees a heart in one, but maybe it’s a crab. She was never very good at absolutes.
“That was a low blow, Lalonde.”
“I know.”
“You’re a bitch.”
“I know that, too.”
She really does.
According to surface values, she is without passion -- without expression. It makes no difference that she’s wordless, because it all dances away with the notes nobody hears. Her silence makes her cheap. She’s just a figure -- an idea.
Maybe that’s why Dave picked her out. She was easy. She was like a chameleon: if someone shoved her into the wall, she’d fade in with the wallpaper. If someone kicked her into the crowd, she’d bleed in seamlessly. That’s what Rose did with him. She was shoved up into a room of crazies and detoxing drug addicts, and she bled into the framework. She looked crazy too.
Was she really though? Rose knew who she was, more or less. It was just getting harder and harder to tell lately.
She feels Dave shift in his seat, and the weight in the couch changes so she knows he’s stood up. When Rose leans up to sit normally, she spots him standing just a foot away from where he previously sat, frown plastered on his face. She was seeing that a lot lately. It was the face he wore when he needed to use.
“Rose, I don’t know what to do with you. You’re a wreck, and-”
“You’re a wreck too,” she counters, quick and precise as she stares at him, her violet eyes too bright and dark-rimmed because she’s been sleeping just as little as he has. But she’s more okay than he is. She’s at least in control. She is always in control.
“And I know that! But I can’t stand it when you don’t take care of yourself.”
And now she’s frowning, and she knows that Dave realized he’s made a mistake by the way he turns and looks away. As if staring at the ground will make stardust real and that picture on the ceiling real and-
“Do you think this is easy on me, either? I can’t stand it when you come back after shooting up, and you just walk around and act like everything is crawling on you. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, and when you react to me it’s like I’m talking to a zombie. You don’t know it’s me. You say my name and it’s like you remember, but it’s that drug in your head. It’s not you, Dave. It’s never you. It’s like all you’re doing is going through the motions, and I don’t think you even realize that. How could you? You just check out and let it run its course while I’m left to pick up the pieces.”
The words are spilling out of her mouth faster than she can register them, and she hates herself for saying that. It’s all true. And that’s the bad thing. She get’s so precise when she’s flustered, when she’s cornered, because she’s a writer and words are her forté. She knows how to twist them in just the right light to give off the illusion that she knows what she’s saying.
Sometimes she wishes she was dumb. That she didn’t understand people. That she couldn’t read them so easily. Because if that was the case, then she wouldn’t have to stare at so many sad faces after she attacks them like that.
She just wants to be wrong.
“I’m working on it, Rose,” Dave murmurs, and the words are punctuated in such a way that makes it sound like he’s trying to restrain himself. And he is. Rose knows it, and Rose is a very curious girl. As they say, curiosity suffers.
“I hate it when you use, Dave.”
She means that. Truly. It bothers her, because it’s like there’s a stranger wearing his skin.
“I hate it when you carve into yourself, Rose.”
She wants to hit him for saying that. She wants to feel her nails clawing into his skin, see him hurt, because how dare he say that about her.
Rose might be in control, but sometimes she has a desire to bleed. She just needs to feel a sting and feel like she has control, so much control, because this was her pain and it was all physical. It was real. It was solid, tangible. It wasn’t the same as what he was comparing it to.
“I hate when you stop eating,” she challenges, and she can practically see the rage bubbling just underneath Dave’s skin. She’s standing now and he’s standing, and they’re both staring at one another, and Rose smirks. It’s a challenge. She wants to draw him out. She wants to see just what he’ll say. She loves these little games, where they poke at one another and see how far they can go.
She loves the rush. She loves the abuse. She loves the control she has over the other person. How much control they have over her.
“I hate when you destroy yourself. You tell me to eat while I’m on a high and I refuse, but you do it while you’re fine. You eat, sure, but don’t think I don’t know about your little private time with the toothbrush. And that’s you sober.”
True story: Food tastes stale in her mouth. Sometimes she has days where everything doesn’t disgust her, but those days are long and far in between. Neither of them are playing fair. Neither of them are okay. They like to pretend they are, but they’re not.
She is not.
She is not okay.
She does not want to admit this. She does not want to admit that she might just be a little unwell, because that would destroy the illusion of control that she has.
Illusions. She’s creating illusions of control like she creates illusions with her words.
There isn’t really a heart up on the ceiling. Nor a crab.
Stardust isn’t in her head.
“I don’t want to do this,” Rose says, and she hates the way her voice sounds. All pathetic and broken like that, a complete contrast of what she is supposed to be. She is a conqueror.
So why is it that the hardest thing to overcome is her own mind?
It would be easy to say that she was depressed, but she’s not. It would be equally easy to say that she’s a narcissist, but that’s not quite right, either. Her nightmares make it difficult to sleep, and she can feel it all fizzing just under her skin. Accusations and diagnoses and that stupid heart on the ceiling...
And Dave is kissing her. It’s halfway between bitter and sweet, electric in a way that she can only describe as bright cerulean behind her eyelids. She never understands her thoughts, how color flows in seamlessly with everything she does, but she assumes it’s just another one of her self-written illusions. She understands it as much as she understands the heart-crab, and she’s okay with that.
“I’m here for you, Rose. You know that. Let me in.”
She tries her best to keep the frown off of her face.
Instead, she settles for a small little smile, the thing pulling at the corners of her face and and painting her into the perfect picture of perfection. There she is, Rose Lalonde, the girl who always wears a smile and has complete control over everything.
“You should be happy where you are, Dave. If I let you in, I might feel a little bad when I hurt you.” She pauses, her lips pressed into a fine line as she continues. “Besides. You’re too good of a picture for me to taint.”
And she twists away from him, flipping her hair in the process, and she laughs. And just for good measure, she adds, “I’m a liar. Don’t trust me.”
She’s nothing. He should avoid her without trying.
She knows that she betrays; that she hurts others. It’s been like that since she learned that love was a better offense then defense...but it’s lonelier when she’s with people. Always reaching out, never quite touching.
“I don’t care,” Dave insists, and she feels a cold hand grip her upper arm. She does not turn around, she does not react. She simply stands where she is, still as stone. “Scribble me in black or throw me in the fire, I don’t care, Rose. I’m not good with metaphors, and I know that I just want to be with you. Isn’t that enough? That I want this?”
She wonders if it is enough. She’s always wanted people to look, but not to Look. She wanted people to listen, but not Listen. She wanted to have Conversations but she didn’t want to Talk.
She’s lower-case, he’s capitalized, and that’s how life works. There are truisms, and there is perceived truth, and there is fact.
“You’re free to do what you want, I won’t stop you. I gave my fair warning. Whatever happens next is all on you.”
Rose doesn’t believe that for a second, but when she turns around and faces him, she’s back to all sweet smiles and bright eyes. Dave just regards her quietly, like he’s not sure what to think. Maybe he doesn’t know. Rose flips her moods like a gambling man flips a coin. She is whatever fits the situation.
But with the way he’s looking at her, she can’t help but wonder how things would be if everything had gone differently. If she had reacted differently. Rose had grown stronger and strived only out of spite. And with the way Dave was looking at her, she couldn’t help but see a reflection of herself.
Beaten down and wasting away. Each new event was another kink in his armor, and even that had been reduced to little more than scrap metal. Rose didn’t want to remember that she used to be exactly like that.
They say remembering removes patches from your heart. Then you just...bleed out. She sometimes wonders that, if she let herself think about everything, would she just bleed out? Would she be able to stop caring?
Rose believes that failures are what make people human. But if they don’t care about their failures, are they no longer human?
Are sociopath’s human?
Dave doesn’t say anything, and instead settles for pulling her into a hug, which she doesn’t resist. Rose likes the way she fits in with him; she’s just the right bit shorter than him so that she’s able to nestle her head in the crook of his neck, just a little over his shoulder. She loves the feel of his heartbeat -- no matter how messed up he is, that’s the one thing that’s always perfect. Even when it’s irregular, it’s still perfect.
No matter how she looked at it, Rose could not see anything functional about them. They were like a broken plate that was smashed and spread haphazardly across the floor -- but she was okay with it, maybe.
‘A medley of disconnected fragments is of as much beauty as the one with a smooth and polished surface.’ She read that, once, in a book about the mind. She’d plucked it off the shelf on a whim, and instantly taken a liking to it.
She wished she could read Dave. She didn’t know why he was still standing with her, alone, in the living room of his apartment. She wasn’t staring up at his stupid ceiling for once, and they were actually touching and...she couldn’t deny she felt safe in the warmth of his skin. He felt real. Human.
It wasn’t that she lacked empathy. She was just...out of touch. She knew how to go through the motions of caring, she was just never sure if she ever actually felt it. If she connected.
“I’ll try not to hurt you,” Rose whispers, all quiet like it’s a secret that only he could know. She’s not even sure if she believes it herself.
But she feels Dave hug her just a little bit tighter, and she feels her smile go just a little bit wider, and she suddenly doesn’t care.
Her mind’s not full of stardust, but there is a fleeting thought of it. There might not actually be a heart or a crab on the ceiling, but there might be depending on how you look at it, and wasn’t that all anything was? Perspective, perspective, and how you look at things.
She’s balancing illusions on her silver tongue, and she’s a liar. But so is everyone. You can only drink lies to yourself for so long until the unquenchable thirst starts to run you dry, and Rose thinks she’s had enough.
She’s not perfect but neither is Dave and neither is the world. They are not perfect together, but they are also not perfect apart.
And so she might be a little unwell. But you’d never tell by looking. Life can be painted to look any way you like, but so can a door or a trash can or a ceiling. So if everything is really about perspective...
She’ll just pretend she’s an artist. She will paint the world, and leave it up to others to understand it or not.