let me introduce you to a hopeless case

The music flooded into her and everything was suddenly alive. Maybe it was just the alcohol or the drugs but every color, every object, was magnified. She sloppily threw her drink over her head, spun around, tried to lose sight of where she was. Everything was so slow. She could feel the beat of the song deep inside her. It seemed unreal - she some magical creature that nothing could touch. She tripped and giggled and shook her head, grabbing her hair and taking another sip of her drink. She twirled and twirled and twirled, nothing could catch her light as she danced.

Another creature was growing inside of her, one she had been visited by many times before. This creature was a monster, a monster with slits for eyes and a malicious laugh, curling fingernails and long, spiny hands that wrapped around her neck. It taunted her, screamed with laughter in her face at her broken body, haunted her with visions from struggled nights, carved shame into her hands. She sat down to breathe because at one point she had stopped. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. She struggled to remember where she was. Who she was. Then someone's face appeared out of nowhere, greeting her, grabbing her hands, come dance! they screamed. So she twirled around until she was dizzy, trying to dance away the monster inside of her. Trying to fight it off by smiling and moving her body to the pounding music, feeling it flow through her veins. On every side of her were bodies, pushing, caving in, crowding her, their faces all running together in this mysterious place. But somewhere in the crowd she saw his face. She stuggled to decipher where she was, where he was, and somehow connecting the two. She opened her eyes wide, staring at him, praying for him to look at her. She twisted her body around, contorting herself, show him she doesn't care. When really every part of her cared. Cared so much it caused her to tear her hair from roots. She was falsely hoping that maybe he would notice how she had become a ghost in her own life. That maybe when he looked into her eyes he would see the same eyes. The ones he once looked into and said "I love you". But she didn't have those eyes anymore. She had the eyes of someone who had been abandoned, deserted, left bleeding and alone. She wasn't the same, and he had never been the same. She became confused, dizzy, hurt. Keep dancing, she said, keep moving. She chugged the rest of her drink, smiled and shrieked with pleasure. The good monster was back, the one that reassured her she would be fine. She swallowed every note and beat that was pounding through the room. But as she closed her eyes she saw a face, a face that held her mouth as she yelled and pushed her into him. She tried to close her eyes, block everything out, have another sip of her drink just to realize she had already consumed it all. Her body was a raging addict, begging to be poisoned to kill this thing inside her. She wanted to forget that he existed and he still had flesh and bones and he still loved others, that he still could wake up in the morning, that he could continue on living while she was slowly and painfully dying. Her insides churned with anger and the monster became stronger, stronger and stronger until everything else turned to nothing. The monster was tearing her heart open, laughing at her, "No one is in your heart, no one is here to keep you company." And it was true.

She was so, so alone.