The hand that gives

As she got ready on her huge bathroom mirror, Lara smiled. She sometimes forgot just how beautiful she was. At just twenty-five, Lara possessed a striking, statuesque presence, moving through the world with effortless grace. She was rarely loud but commanded attention with her presence. But somehow she couldn't control her thoughts. She pressed her fingertips against the cold bathroom sink until her nails turned white, but she felt absolutely nothing. The beauty, the youth—it was all just white noise masking a vast, echoing hollow inside her. She felt like a ghost haunting her own life, a beautiful corpse performing the motions of living for an audience she did not care about. As she kept staring at her reflection a quite malice grew with each passing second. It wouldn't be that hard to let the mask slip, to let someone see the ugliness she cultivated behind closed curtains. Smile, always smile. She had to remind herself every waking second. " Why am i like this?" She said out loud, almost as if she expected an answer back. Her parents were carved from great ambition and discipline. She lacked both. She never lacked love, infact she had everything that anyone could ask for. Love from her family as well as money from her parents. The path back to normalcy was a map she had entirely mislaid, leaving her stranded in a gray landscape where wellness felt like an impossibility. She caught herself leaning into the grim thoughts, cultivating them like rare, poisonous flowers in the pristine sanctuary of her mind. When she reached inside herself for the instinct to fight the gloom, she found only an echoing vacancy. She didn't want to be fixed; she didn't want the bright, exhausting energy that her family offered so freely. There was a terrible, luxurious peace in surrendering to the numbness, an intoxicating freedom in finally deciding that she was perfectly content to never be alright again. Yet, somedays she thought it wouldn't be so bad to have a normal life. Jake..... Silly thoughts. She had a purpose to find, a life to destroy, to drown in her marble tub. How beautiful would it be to see red liquid flowing down those symmetrical cheekbones. Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of glass shuttering outside. She looked out the window just in time to see her brother hide a baseball bat behind his back. "Justin!" " Relax princess, it wasn't your car this time," he said with a mischievous grin. Oh , how she wished she could freely be a trouble maker like her brother. Freely be herself, a serial killer. Okay , maybe she was milking it. She couldn't actually kill anyone.... She just dreamt about it, there is a difference. She quickly drowned out the background. She was late for work but her thoughts were all over. No motivation whatsoever.