Today is not your day. The sun is too bright, not helping your growing headache. Your head is throbbing and your arm is sore from how you slept on it. The guy who offered you a ride home ditched you at the gas station five miles from your house. You have to walk, alone, on the cracked desolate road with only your dying ipod for company. You remember not too long ago when you were in the same situation. When you killed the girl you used to be, kind, honest, the girl your parents created. The girl whose death you mourn when life kicks you around.

***
    The dim light peeking from behind the curtains scorching her heavy eyelids caused her to twitch. Now awake but not fully ready to lift her body off the hard wooden floor she must have passed out on last night.
    Just thinking of her last trip sent her into a storm of mixed emotions. On one side she regretted letting her hunger get the best of morality but on the other hand she bathed in the joy of her night of complete freedom. Although her arm was tender where the needle had pierced her skin she smiled, but when her hand went to reach for her beautiful hair her fingers grasp nothing and the smile faded.  Frantically she touched her head and felt the itchy prickle of a week old beard.
    “What happened to my hair?” she thought depressingly.
    The one remnant of the girl she used to be was gone, laying haphazardly all around her on the wooden floor that served as her bed the night before. Slowly and tentatively she picked up a clump of the blonde beauty. One single tear slipped down her face as she mourned a long forgotten ghost.
***
   
    Milton’s Factory on Broadway was once a bustling industry that sent the small town of Cumberville to the top of the economic ladder. It had provided jobs for the locals, produced and sold a millions worth of hair elastics and stood as a window of hope for the people of Cumberville. Everyone was happy and alive! There was no homeless, no drugs, no crimes, and no broken families, some called the town Utopia because it seemed like the perfect society. Until it wasn’t.
    On November 26, 2003 Milton’s was shut down permanently. Apparently the neighboring town, Mentford, had opened a bigger and better factory and had created a new design for hair elastics. Their product smothered Cumberville’s sales and finally suffocated them. The locals were angry and frantic. They didn’t know what to do, so many of them lost their jobs and being that there was no available work in town they didn’t have any options. Many rioted and some simply left. The once happy town crumbled into depression.
Now more than a decade later the once thriving industry is no more than a pile of bricks and broken elastics writhing like black snakes when gusts of wind erupt through shattered windows: disrupting the death-like stillness of forgotten happiness. Those that entered the desolate factory were engulfed in the whisper of what the building once held.
Desperate souls, notorious sinners and saints who lost faith not only in their fellow Man but also in their almighty God. People with no hope left in their hearts crawl inside the building, dragging their bodies down the halls, the only sound is the echo of who they once were calling for them to find themselves again. These people are stripped of dignity, they no longer care how they are perceived by the outside world; by people who never had the courage to climb to the top only to fall and crash; left at the bottom, maybe even lower than where they began, just a pile of broken bones and shattered dreams.
***

The girl walks slowly out of the building. Bald head reflecting the hot afternoon sun. She puts on a sweatshirt and pulls the hood up covering her face slightly as she turns down the road towards town. She has her chin out and head faced forward. Her steps glide across the crumbling tar uninterrupted by the many potholes that come her way. She checks something in her hand and frowns. A truck drives up beside her and the driver rolls down the window. She smiles and opens the door. She gets in and closes the door with a thud.
***

    What happened to her? What happened to the girl she used to be? She was happy. Had the whole world in her tiny perfectly manicured hands. Parents that pushed her to be her best, friends that adored her, and a brother that would have done anything for her. Why wasn’t that enough?  She had everything! Perfect family, perfect friends, and she was even perfect. What compelled such a pristine girl to ruin herself, to ruin her life?
***

    Nobody knows what it’s like to be perfect. To be the girl everybody strives to be, to know, to love. Nobody understands the pressure and stress of it all.
    I just wanted to be normal. I didn’t want my life. If given a choice between being flawless or being human, I would have picked human, because that’s what I am or wanted to be.
    Normal girls can stay childlike, can call their fathers daddy, can parade around with no makeup and dress in sweats and baggy stained football jerseys without judgement, can hang out with people who share interests not power, can eat a ---- cheeseburger without guilt or disgust. Normal girls have it all. They get to live without a care in the world while the perfect people watch from afar as they are torturing themselves day and night so the world around them never see just under their skin. Where desire, pain, hunger, confusion, and despair lurk beneath the paper thin wall we build around ourselves. And when the pressure of being perfect becomes too strong to handle these flaws explode in such a passion that people looking on wonder if the person in front of them is even the same person.
Just as quickly as we explode though we pull the mess of our true selves back behind the wall and the people wonder again if what they saw was even real or if it was just a flickering of their reality.
Nobody was ready for my explosion. Looking back I realize neither was I.
***

I bet you’re a good girl. I bet you’ve never done anything morally wrong or illegal before. Well except tonight. You know they could see how rookie you were. Laughing and giggling like a fool, a fool who gets to walk home alone. Alone in the cold. Your throat is tight and your eyes burn. Not from the frigid wind though. Regret is what eats at you. Tearing out your insides, leaving them strewn on the ground for everybody to see. You feel pathetic. You really should. What will your parents think? You know your older brother never did anything as bad as you did tonight. Don’t even try to forget, the memory is already embedded in your subconscious laying dormant until it’s ready to pounce and strike at you with the brutal reality. What you did was wrong.  Goes against everything you were taught as a child.
But it was fun wasn’t it? While it was happening. All your friends  cheering you on, the cute boy in your economics class with the green eyes and sweet smile with his soft lips on your earlobe whispering his glorious praise. You were in heaven. You can’t deny it. It was fun to be bad. To taste the bittersweet nectar of rebellion. You felt alive. You felt free. You finally know what it's like to be sky high and what it means to fall. Hard. Surrounded by friends in the beginning but left to fend for yourself in the end. You are a loser. With new scars to prove it. But maybe you will find that place again. Your very own heaven on earth. Where you are free from this life you will never see again. Oh you don’t know? Once you have a taste you can never fill that forever present hunger. The pull is too strong. Where your happiness lays, a needle won’t be too far away.
***

It’s been two days since her last trip. The hunger is ever growing inside her. It calls out with outstretched arms resembling a child for her to feed it. Her whole body is twitching with a failed attempt of quieting the calls. She tries passing time by reading the novel her mother bought her months ago but can’t quiet her mind long enough to actually enjoy it. Her leg does an involuntary kick. She places a clammy hand over her knee to calm herself.
Her body breaks into a sweat.  She begins playing with the hair she no longer has, a habit she would learn to avoid. Her heart races wildly and she can’t help but glance at her phone laying on the nightstand.
Nobody could understand the joy she felt when the piece of plastic finally buzzed with a familiar tune. She answered the phone trying to conceal her desperation.
Six o’clock tonight? Of course she could make it she thought wildly. She wouldn’t have cared if he had suggested two in the morning. She would travel the ends of the earth to get that one short experience of happiness she no longer could withhold in this dank and grey life.  Her world was an arrangement of black and white with middle grey splattered in between. Until the moment when needle met skin were her eyes opened to a different world. Only then did her world fill with vibrant colors and only then as her body soared above the souls chained against the grey world did she feel free and smile.
***

You need to stop lying to yourself. It’s not healthy. Even for you.  A low life with no ambition. You promised you’d quit, you swore on the grace of God that you’d give it all up. But we all know you stopped believing in God when he didn’t answer your prayers or help you conquer your demons that slept inside of you.  You lied. The pull of your sin is too strong, it caresses your heart, muddles your brain. You are no longer the girl you once were. You have been consumed by the dark flaws that lurked behind your frail skin. They ate at your soul until it became no more. You are nothing but a shell. A shell filled with so much hate and blackness that it no longer resembles the person you strived to be. The person your family pushed you to be. The person your friends wanted you to be. That perfect girl. That girl you murdered mercilessly over the past year. The girl you mourned at first but soon wiped out of your memory for she was your downfall. She bruised you internally leaving your soul scarred with cuts so deep you never thought they’d heal. That girl tried to choke you out, she would have succeeded too if you hadn’t finally found a weakness in her perfect persona. You kept feeding the desire she had to feel loved. To feel wanted. You tainted her morals and she slowly changed. Evolved into who you are today. 
You are a monster. You are exactly who you wanted to be. You are flawed and nobody judges you for there is nobody left to judge. They all were pushed away, ripped out of your heart and mind. You didn’t need them to fill you anymore. You had the needle for that. You are no longer perfect. You have plenty of scars peppered around your face and arms to prove that. The stress and pressure is no longer weighing you down promising to break you. Your only worry is when you can get your next fix.
    I wonder if you can even remember what it means to laugh without feeling hollow inside. Do you still get echos of true undying happiness that rack your body and leave you breathless gasping for air?  Does your skin still remember what it was like to be caressed with a loving hand or to wrap around a heart that loved you? Of course you do. But there is nothing to bring it back. You cast a shadow over it all. You secluded yourself in a sea of despair, of loneliness.
    Trapped on your own island until insanity crawls into your already damaged mind. And you are left to deal with those new demons until they too explode. Leaving. You. Dead. Inside.
No longer a fallen angel but a demon crawling from the depths of ----. You. Are. Ruined.