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Sometimes, Cecelia thinks it wasn't just the gouges in her wrists that would've killed her.
With every drooping morning and tidbit of news about the world that kept the pressure in her throat building-
No, Cecelia had been dying for a long time before that. Maybe ever since she had been born.
Even if it wasn't as visible or if people just didn't want to see it. She would climb the tree in her front yard, pray for answers of the cruelty and turmoil that lay writhing under her skin and listen to the silence it always brought.
Her sisters didn't understand, it felt like no one did. They were happy with their role, obedient and religious enough as anything.
Cecelia could only feel the sharp edges of her laminated Mary dig into her hand, trace the edges of the ceramic cross that adorned her bedroom floor and beg for an answer to everything. Maybe Jesus felt like that near his first end, could only stare at the sky for a response that he didn't know would come and embrace the sensation of metal tearing through flimsy, mortal veins.
She was thirteen years old, she was a girl. She was practically nothing.
The scratch of a pen against paper soothed her for a little while. Letting her hand trace familiar grooves and press down stickers with the firmness of a gentle hand. The sound was comforting but not nearly as much was the idea of a recipient on the other end.
Even if they could not reply, someone had to be listening.
God didn't answer her cries, no matter the figures and pictures she hung on her wall with a fervour and frustration that didn't match who she was supposed to be. Her mother didn't listen, not her father. She could talk and they would hear her but they never listened.
Some moments, when Mary would tape the clicking, colourful beads of her bracelets to stay in place, with a care Cecelia knew could only come from someone truly looking at her, but within the next it was gone again. They stood and left the one room that didn't feel so suffocating and Cecelia and Mary were gone.
Cecelia and Lux and Bonnie and Mary and Therese were all gone.
There were only the white clothed, Lisborn sisters walking with the feeble legs of a lamb and a heart that felt immeasurably large.
Punch sloshing in cheap, plastic cups grated on her ears and she stared at the boys milling around. The way they shoved up close to the others, trying to get a taste of fruit and the unattainable innocence that rested on her sisters tongues.
Her own party and the only thing reminiscent of Cecelia was the perfectly matched grooves of her fingernails in the chair beneath her.
Socialisation was supposed to help her, make her better and perfect and a proper Lisborn again.
Yet Cecelia could only watch the leering intent behind every silhouette and feel the disgust stick to her teeth.
She couldn't stand it.
Most days, the blood coursing through her veins felt like a poison. Like the spread of a disease dampening her eyes and dragging her bones with an age old exhaustion that whispered to let them lie.
Another creature had ended up on the extinction list for that year. It felt like a betrayal and so did the apathy that followed it. In a way it felt kindred to her.
In its last moments, knowing it was the final one of itself that would ever exist or be seen, did it too wish for at least an audience to witness its life? Did it feel the glancing gaze of the creatures around it and taste the bitterness on their tongue when they realised it wasn't of importance to see till the end? Would it have lived longer to enjoy the presence of anyone, held on and fought for a few more fleeting seconds?
Cecelia wasn't the last. There were other blonde, innocent Lisborn sisters. Other little thirteen year old girls who wished to scream their anguish from the tree tops and let scratchy throats bleed from the volume but were taught to be too well mannered.
No.
Cecelia would be the first.
Cool window glass caressed her fingertips like a foreboding freedom, perhaps they were, it didn't matter to her really. Maybe she'd soar to freedom, maybe she'd go to heaven, or maybe you got one chance to be conscious and that was it.
All that mattered was piercing metal and the exhaustion that had settled behind her eyes.