Context - Whose Reality?

[TheTallOne]

Just a piece I wrote for Whose Reality...not sure if the reference to the text comes through, or to the prompt. It's clear in my head, but very implicit, just wanted to know if other people could see it. Let me know? Plus, any advice.


Every reality is open to interpretation


I reached out my fingers carefully, hesitantly placing them on her shoulder. The touch was barely there, lighter than a feather, I could not risk anything heavier lest she crumple beneath the weight of my hand. Excessive? No, she was fragile, weak. A mild gust of wind could have lifted her off her feet and had her flying like a kite through the sky.

And in some ways she was like a kite these days. Too pointy, too linear, too papery thin. Her bones jutted out like the frame of a kite, skin stretched taut over the angular lines, and there were days when I felt she was not really walking and talking next to me, rather floating up with the clouds on the unbearable lightness that was taking over her life.

I wanted nothing more than to fix her – to fix this. But nothing I did seemed to help, not the proclamations of her beauty, not contrived, but true before, when there was anything to look at – now she was barely there and slowly disappearing. She declared them false. Her mind was warped, her sense of self. Food was the enemy, her body the enemy; she was the soldier, constantly battling against it and the world, just to live another day (ironic as that was, for her war was draining away her life) and to be one step closer to that unattainable and dangerous picture of perfection.

She had always been insecure about herself for as long as I could remember. I blame her parents. I blamed them then, for their high expectations which could not have been filled, even by the most perfect of humans (and we all know there is no such thing as the perfect human), for their constant criticisms of her, of the way she looked, of the way she acted, how she walked and talked. I blame them even more now, and perhaps that made me a terrible person, for laying fault on the dead. Yes, she had always been insecure, but she had always been smart. She was not like this. While they were alive she had been able to overcome the fear and disgust with the knowledge that they would always be around for her to try to please.

Now that they were gone she took it as a personal affront. She was not good enough for them to stay alive; they did not want to live as long as she was also living. I  hated them for that – for making her feel as though it was her fault that they died, that if she had only somehow lived up to their expectations they would not have left her. Their death destroyed any hold she had, any belief that she was, some part of her, good enough. It was not solely their fault, the doctors made it worse, with their doubt over causes and guilt, laying the blame on her shoulders for their death, with words like mental breakdown, stroke – because they could not cope with a daughter who lived in opposition to their reality.

And in doing so they had massacred hers. There had been a time, just before their death when she was okay. When she had been strong, strong enough to tell them that she was perfect the way she was, that they were wrong, not her. Then, all their chants of ‘you will never be good enough’, and ‘no daughter of mine would ever do that’, ‘you’re evil and deplorable and sinning against god’ and ‘why would she want you anyway? No one ever would’ and worst of all ‘You disgust me and I wish that you had never been our daughter’ could not hurt her. She was above them, and I held her hand, told her I loved her, that everything would be fine, that she would be okay. And she was. My careful attempts to rewire her brain, to undo 19 years of damage had been working, albeit slowly, and for a while she believed me, she was getting better, she was living, really living true to herself. She had found her reality, ours, where she was perfect, where her parents didn’t matter, where love was all that did. She had stopped desperately trying to cling on to the reality of her parents, one where she would never really fit in. She was happy. And then it all went to hell.

And now, 14 months after their death she was still floundering. Their absence had torn a gaping hole in her mind; she was unable once more to see what I saw, to feel what I felt. Suddenly what we were doing was wrong, she was not perfect, and she was disgusting and sick.

Her shoulder felt wrong under my fingertips. Her collarbone protruded too far, and there was a series of triangular indents as she inhaled and exhaled, making obvious where each of her bones started and ended. She did not see this. She did not see how twig-like her legs looked; she did not see that her arms looked as though they could be snapped in two with no effort on my part. She did not see that her face was gaunt and pale, that her eyes were too wide, too open, too vulnerable and fragile on that face.

Standing in front of the mirror she told me, staring straight into our reflections, that she was ugly. I could not see it – to me she was the most beautiful creature alive, far more so than me, more so than anybody else on the planet. Most people I knew agreed, they saw the beauty in her eyes, in her skin, in her face, in her hair, in her body, in her soul. I told her this.

But without even acknowledging my interjection she continued on. She told me she was useless. I told her that she had done more for me in my life than anyone else that I knew, that she was the most helpful and caring person in my universe, that she was special, and that she was talented and brilliant.

She told me she was heartless. I told her that I loved her too much to let her go, and that even if she felt she had no heart of her own, she had been holding mine for years.

She told me she was a failure, told me that she was a broken wreck that nobody wanted. I told her that in my eyes she was the most perfect and beautiful creature I had ever seen, and that I would never stop wanting her, never stop needing her.

She told me she was fat. I told her to look at herself once more, to see me standing next to her. To see the way that my fingers could fit around her ankle, her wrist, her bicep, how they fit in between her ribs, around her waist. I told her she was fading, told her that she was anything but fat, that she needed to eat, that she needed to stop this.

‘You don’t understand.’

She was right. I didn’t. I could not see what she was seeing, could not understand how she could possibly believe that. I could not see why she would not believe me. Her eyes were warped, her brain was warped, her sense of reality skewed. She was not seeing what was real and true. Her interpretation of reality was stuck in the past, strengthened by the shouts of people long dead and gone.  She was wrong, but she could not see it. And I did not understand that, could not understand that.

I took her in my arms then, holding her close, but not too tightly, still terrified that one false move would crush her. I told her she was right, that I could not understand, that she did not understand me. But I told her I was trying, and that she had to try for me. I  told her that maybe we were both wrong, and that we just had to find the way of seeing reality that was right, the reality that was true, the reality that was real.