4Face Down
His name was Patrick. He became her torment over time. He could slice her with words and gouge her with wounds. She let him because she needed it to happen. There was nothing else to care about. She was estranged from her family and they only kept her because the government wouldn't let her leave. They fed her, clothed her, gave her money and anything else she could ever possibly dream of. They gave her anything to get her away from them and off their backs. She was stuck in a callous reality and Patrick was her release. He was the only one who gave enough of an effort to simply acknowledge her existence. He was something she could control. Though what he does to her may not exhibit signs of controllability, she knew she always had the real control.
She could provoke him with a word or an action and she knew exactly the reaction he would have because he was just that predictable.
She was a mangled mess of a human being. She didn't know what she was doing. All she wanted was for someone to care, for someone to notice her, for someone to show her and tell her she wasn't just a worthless mound of moving flesh. She wanted to feel and to be real. She wanted to experience what it felt like to be and connected and loved by someone. Patrick was the closest thing she could get to that and so she kept him. She lets him do as he pleases because it lets her feel and feel real. It lets her know she's alive and that someone cares enough to take the time out of their day to pity her with their violence.
She's learned to hate people. She hates the way they laugh so freely, how they feel pity but not enough to actually care, how they carry on oblivious to the harshness of the world, how they make promises only to break them.
Music used to be her outlet and it still is but sometime between 15 and 16 it just wasn't enough anymore. Her words never truly conveyed her feelings and her fingers never bent the right way, they never put the right combinations of chords and notes together, her strumming patterns were never rhythmic enough. She'd play until her fingers bled and it still never felt like enough. Sometimes she'd look down at her bleeding fingers and cry, damning them for not being good enough to give her the catharsis she needed. Her feelings instead carried with her until her emotions welled up into a cannonball of fury and she ended up with her fist though her wall.
It would be cliché to say that she became numb to the feeling of being considered second-rate trash or that her walls were impenetrable and that she could no longer bring herself to cry. She had plenty of tears left in her, her walls were sent crumbling down every time she played music, and numbness would mean she didn't care about her state of mind and outward appearance but she did care. No matter how much she tried to deny it, she cared. She cared so much that it sometimes got her into more trouble than she planned on inducing. She was like a comet shooting through the sky waiting to be taken out with the force of impact. She had hopes and dreams but they were shot down quicker than an eleven year old who still believed in Santa Clause.
Her magic was taken away from her at an early age, her childhood a memory that had tainted her views. Her past was a precise network and crisscross of scars that ran deeper on her heart than the ones on her memories. The heart never completely hardens because the heart is the giver of hope and the mind is the one that kills expectation. A life without hope is not a life worth living. Hope is what wakes us up in the morning and puts us to sleep in hopes that the next day will hold a future brighter than the previous days.
She once held a hope bigger and brighter than anyone she'd ever encountered. She had hope that someone would take her and make her safe. That they would love her because she was her. Not for select features but for everything that made her who she was, including the damage, the pain, the fears, the hope, and the care she had reserved in her for the right time.
It took a while for her to get used to the feeling of neglect. Emotional neglect was a fate worse than physical neglect. Emotions were wild and untamed and a physical state was controlled and definitive. She would heal physically but emotionally she was scarred beyond the mental capacity of most. She grew up quick and learned to fend for herself even quicker. She knew how to manipulate a person into doing whatever she wanted. It was a skill that came naturally. She possessed the ability to take all she could get because she usually got nothing but contempt. A murderous glare that killed her insides faster than any death could have. She lost her youth and prided herself on her knowledge of the world. She knew a little about a lot. She wasn't sheltered by any means. She was free to roam and do as she pleased. Her lack of restriction gave her a greater self-discipline than any teenager her age.
Sometimes she didn't even mind because it meant she got to write a song from the trauma. A beautiful and brilliant song that the world would probably never have to opportunity to hear.