Salt

She hadn't seen herself so pale since she was a child, before her body hungered for change, and blood, and tears, before her eyes grew soft but sharp like salt that fed the ocean from which she came. She felt different too, more and more she found the brush between her fingers limp and lifeless, a stillborn child, and for some reason this gave her comfort. The paintings before came from far away, from someone else, and were woven in crimson, in shadowed angles she felt in ways she couldn't control. She began to take solace in her newfound inability to draw from this well of terrible beauty, to remorse in the dragging chasm which it left, to despise the thoughts that filled its wake. Yet something in her felt accomplished, feminine, for she had longed for so many years to be pale and thin, to be nothing, to wither herself into the background and be unseen, invisible, beautiful. Was it all some illusive desire, a trick she'd played to distract from the mundane? Was it really feminine to lose yourself in numbers which grow smaller and smaller and yet are never enough? Was it really beautiful to watch with an uncanny acceptance as tear-streaked makeup melts down your cheeks each night just to be painted over in the morning?