working-title, suggestions more than welcome.

actually, kind of a working-piece. but i figured i'd post it anyway.

memory walls

She closed her eyes and found her world inside her. The walls were familiar, faintly grayed from having too many things hung on them, taken down, and re-hung somewhere else. She reached inside and into this memory reality and pulled it out of her. The light smells of lavender and vanilla filled her nose and suddenly she was enveloped in the protection of the harsh edges of freshly cut hair and a mask of dark eyeliner. The room shifted to be her familiar space. The offending lights and temperature of her physical surroundings were no longer there, replaced with the perfectly uncomfortable just-too-warm or just-too-cool of her room and the dim coloured lights that have always been bad for her but unbelievably comforting. Only once everything felt just right and she had crawled into her world could she synchronize thought and feeling and get to the heart of her thoughts.

She doesn't need now. Now is just like then was, just somewhere else making it a little bit different. How much is in setting, anyway? It's all about perception. And right now she can hear the same strains echoing in this different music, playing the same feelings she's felt thousands of times. She didn't even need to do anything anymore. Just the idea of freshly cut hair echoed in her mind so loudly she could almost believe it. She could believe it enough to hide in it, at least until she learned to be comfortable with something else. Until she learned how to be herself with something else. Until she learned how to be herself.

Different CD, same isolation. Her thoughts still set her apart, striving to touch someone but never quite able to reconcile the actuality with its perfect counterpart in her head. Nothing will ever be perfect like it is in her head. She's afraid to do things that could make her happy. She's sick of learning over and over again that it just doesn't work the way it does in movies, in books, in her imagination, in her dreams. She dreams of the things she can never have. Her fantasies are all things she can't do because she's too scared to try. Because she knows things don't work like the movies and that the easiest thing to do is get hurt. So instead she dreams and wishes something would one day actually mean something.

It had been too long since she had been touched. Not just a sympathetic hug, she got lots of those, but the kind of touch you're meant to feel inside and out, through your entire body. She didn't even remember what it was like to respond to someone's touch. She dreamed it and made it up and told herself stories, but it was all in her imagination. She dreamed of having people touch her and love her, having people want her and need her and crave her and take her, but she knew none of that would happen. She wouldn't let it. Something in her was too scared to let anyone touch her. She always shied away, afraid that maybe she would feel something. That way, she didn't have to try. No one could hurt her but herself unless she let them. She hurt a lot. But it was all her own fault, and somehow that made it better. As long as she could slip back into the familiar walls of her memory-home, she would be okay.