Page 5 of Feed Your Fiends

Then, at the perfect moment, the big finale, he’d slipped on my glass slipper, my glass-filled pointe shoe that punctured more than just my soles. I’m riddled with leftover fragments the surgeons missed three days ago during my surgery because they’re microscopic. They can’t see them, but I canfeelthem.

I’m extracting them myself by squeezing and picking at every shard, every single memory with him, but I’m only causing more damage because I’m bleeding myself dry in the process.

Nothing helps.Nothing.No matter how long I stare at the clock, waiting for another sedative to take the edge off, it never becomes bearable. The doctors say it’s all psychosomatic now. There’s nothing else they can do to help me. With time, my body will heal itself.

Time.

They say time heals all wounds, and it’s the biggest fucking lie I’ve ever been told. And I’ve been told a lot of lies.

Like that, Jaime, my mother who never visited me in the hospital up until I put her on the blocked list, loved me.

Like that, Gant Auclair was in love with me.

Like all those daily affirmations I’d chanted in the mirror, brainwashing myself into believing I was beautiful, smart, kind and a good ballet dancer. That I was worthy of the fake scholarship at Beaulieu Academy that Gant had schemed for me.

Lies.All lies I’d convinced myself to cope with my existence no one gave a fuck about, including me. How could I when I sought comfort with my tormentor? When I’d allowed myself to free-fall into his arms because I was teetering on the edge anyway. What did I have to lose if I had nothing to give?

But he saw through my shell, which I believed was empty, and found something. My secret speck of hope that someone would find me special. That someone would see me like Beaulieu hadn’t. Like my parents hadn’t, unless my father needed someone to blame.

But he saw me. He always saw me.

He told me all those pretty nothings I’d chanted in the mirror, giving me what I couldn’t give myself: love, or the perception of it. I didn’t know what it felt like or how to differentiate the real from the fake. He filled my shell with the knockoff until it was overflowing. Then he’d placed me on that glass pedestal and drop-kicked it so I spilled all that imaginary love before impaling myself on the sparkling shards. So I could become like those shards. Hopelessly broken, never to be put back together again.

And here I lay, unable to piece myself together, but why would I want to? I can’t lie to myself any more. I hate myself, and there’s no escape.

Yes, there is…a sweet whisper curls around my ears.

It’s so gentle. So alluring…

You can escape this pain… Jarett, Jaime, Gant Auclair, poverty, the prospect of never dancing again…

The doctors say I need time. No less than a few weeks before, I can attempt ballet in satin slippers. No pointe shoes this month. And the next?

Time doesn’t exist here,that beautiful voice coos.You won’t have to wait just to be disappointed. There are no disappointments here.

No debts to pay at checkout.

The surgery. My hospital stay. The physiotherapy I’d need to recover.Recover… Where would I heal now that I’m homeless?

Jaime lost our flat, blowing her money on scratch cards and Jarett’s favourite beer as she reminisced about her lost love. She lured herself into a drunken stupor with rose-coloured glasses, picturing a life with my father that never existed. That will never exist because he’s long gone. She uses the Auclairs’ alleged retaliation over his affair to blame for his absence. I use a mirror to see our stark reality that’s becoming starker now that the drugs are creeping out of my system.

No flat. Potentially no Beaulieu. No money. No mother. No him.

Just me.

I glance around the hospital room. How would I pay for any of this?

You can’t.

I can’t.

None of that matters here because there is nothing here.

Nothing? Not even light?

Just blissful, dark quietness.

The lack of time the ethereal voice speaks of spins to a stop at the revelation. I didn’t have to do this any more. Any of it…

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