Blue Ring

Probably the only thing I've been proud of in a long time.

There is a tiny girl with a little blue ring on the fourth finger of her right hand that sits on the ground wondering if anyone out there has any interest in picking her up. Her parents should have been there hours ago, or at least someone should have been. She sits on the dirty ground and wonders also, if they’ll remember on their own, or if it will take seeing the empty porcelain plate sitting at the first spot on the right at dinnertime to remind them of the blue eyed child that should be ravenously eating tonight’s spaghetti or meatloaf or chicken pot pie. This isn’t the first time she’s been left, she remembers. It also probably will not be the last, she decides. The small girl begins to daydream about foreign lands with strange people and beautiful sights, spending well over three hours wrapped up in the deepest parts of her mind, the parts she is told to shut away. In a way, it can be a blessing that they aren’t around to tell her she needs to interact with other people. In a way, it is the moments where it seems the entire world has lost its connection with her that she finds her strongest hold yet. When her parents show up, they apologize profusely, pretending for the briefest moment that this is about her, before simultaneously explaining reasons why it is not their fault that a ten year old girl was left by herself in a parking lot for hours. She buckles her seat belt and kicks up two little legs that do not quite reach the floor, shrugging off their apologies and assuring them that she doesn’t care. Because, really, she doesn’t. She was never truly alone, not with her mind. A beautiful little dreamer with blue eyes that see a world with blurry edges does not always need the company of other people to make her feel alive.

Although, as she looks out the window, she sees a small stuffed animal laying on the ground by where she sat, and for the briefest moment she is reminded of an all too familiar feeling, the feeling of being left behind.

There is an adolescent girl with a little blue ring on the fourth finger of her right hand that sits on the edge of the room, quietly observing the party her sister is throwing while her parents are out of town. Her silence goes unnoticed by the throng of people dancing and drinking and singing all around her dimly lit, strange smelling house. She watches a tall blonde girl refill her fifth drink and makes up a story about who she is trying to drown out of her mind with the liquid fire of alcohol. She sees a dorky boy slip out the front door obviously upset thanks to the group of inconsiderate soccer players huddled by the staircase, and wonders why they don’t like him so much. She wonders if there is a reason for their cruelty, or if they themselves don’t even know why they take the fragility of human emotion and throw it to the ground, shattering it carelessly, like the picture frame of her “family” she sees cast hopelessly onto the floor. She notices again the tall blonde, who is acting strangely incoherent, even for someone who is drunk. The soccer players look at each other and grin, the tallest and darkest of the group slowly making his way over to her. She watches him catch the stumbling tall girl’s arm and watches him guide her up the stairs. She sits, silent as ever, and wonders if she should have done something. She cannot speak though, hasn’t been able to in years, and no one notices her presence here, anyway. The sound of someone’s voice in her ear would be almost too much to handle for the blue eyed girl with pale skin, sitting on the edge of her dining room floor. The little girl has grown into someone who cannot fathom the idea of trying to allow another person to understand the cursed mind she has not been able to understand herself. She is drowning, her sanity escaping her like the blonde girl’s awareness and the dorky boy’s confidence. She draws further into herself and notices one last time, the dark haired soccer player coming down the steps only to collect a five dollar bill from his friends.

Five dollars, that was the price of destroying someone’s life.

The blue eyed girl who cannot speak walks down into the empty basement bathroom and throws up everything she’s eaten that day, knowing she’d never forgive herself for what happened tonight.

There is a teenage girl with a little blue ring on the fourth finger of her right hand downing shot after shot to wash away the tornado in her head. She swings her dark hair around her arms and presses closer to the red headed boy dancing against her. He smells like vodka and cloves, the signature scent of every young playboy in this bar. They’re on a table-top, put on display in front of every other college kid in this place, soaking up her desperation as effortlessly as her boyfriend--ex--had for months before. Blindly trusting and willfully believing, she allowed him to use her in a twisted experiment of his own creation, a careless examination to test the hypothesis he put in his own mind. Erasing the memory is imperative and simple, the quick combination of mind altering substances and the loud music thumping under her feet. Dark lights, dark eyes, and dark thoughts mix together in a cocktail of regret. She could accept that the relationship was built on a lie, but she thought the lie was another girl. The truth was much different, much worse, much more heartbreaking. He’d spent months seducing her into falling for him, months learning the intimate details of the female anatomy only to reveal those weren’t the organs he wanted his mouth wrapped around. She turns quickly and dances face to face against the boy whose hands are eagerly grasping at her waist. After a few songs, a few dozen drinks and a few hundred attempts, the boy wins and drags her to his apartment, undressing her on the way up the steps, down the hallway and through the door to a bedroom that smells a lot like the musty bar four blocks away. He asks if she’s sure, but does not hesitate for an answer.

It’s okay, however, because she agrees anyway. Despite her drunken confusion and hazy thought process, she needs this. She needs this tall ginger to make her remember that she’s more than an experiment. She needs him to press against her and remind her that a boy wants her to be a girl. She needs him to help her forget the boy who only wanted her to be a boy. When it’s all over he runs his hands down her arms and calls her baby. She pushes his hands off and asks for a drink. He returns with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses but she stands up, pulls on her heels and takes a drink straight from the bottle before sliding out through the door, leaving the confused boy drunk and tired and alone. Back in her house, she looks at herself in the full length mirror and thinks about how nice it will be when she can forget his hands for good. She’s done this every night for two weeks, but she can still feel his fingers, she can still feel his tongue. He touched her skin and made her fall in love, but it was all a test. She was nothing but a body made of skin and bone, a guinea pig to molest until he was sure her gender was not what he wanted.

Despite the likelihood that this plan will work, she knows she will continue every night until she wastes away into her army of lovers or ends up dead in an alley for pushing herself against the wrong boy.

There is a young woman with a little blue ring on the fourth finger of her right hand laying in a coffin made of the same mahogany wood as the living room floors in her childhood home. Too much happened on those floors, too much for her to escape, and now the memory has taken its toll. It is raining outside, the same dreary weather as the day they buried a tall blonde girl. Makeup pitifully attempts to conceal the angry red rope burns that marr the woman’s neck, the same marks that distorted the pale skin of the blonde, identical signs of the harsh winds of reality. Most of the same people attend the funeral, an unavoidable truth in a town as small as theirs. The young blue eyed girl with pale skin grew up into a confused dreamer, scarred by years of invisibility and neglect, the luckless romantic that the entire world seemed to forget. The blonde had broken her faith in humanity, but after the blonde was the boy. The boy who ripped her heart out and gave it to someone else. The boy who led her down the road to her pathetic state today. He is standing in the back of the room, eyes rimmed in red and hand intertwined with the dorky boy that the soccer players picked on all those years ago.

There is only 98lbs resting softly in the casket, another symbol of the penetrating hopelessness that lived in her soul, an anorexic body starved of food to reflect the anorexic heart that was starved of love. Love was the only thing she had ever needed. And, somehow, love was the only thing she never received.

Reviews

[Jessica]

I can tell you've worked hard on this. What a heartbreaking scenario. You portrayed it very well. Bringing the dorky boy in at the end was a nice touch. The last paragraph was my favorite...it truly captured the essence of the story.

[Finally, Honesty]

This is just an amazing piece of work. I may be a bit biased because it's personal but it is nevertheless a gorgeous creation. I hope you keep posting