She traces her finger along her jaw, and considers replacing it with her Stanley knife. You can tell how good a foundation is by how visible the line is, and this is the line that she considers emphasising. She thinks, perhaps, that she could trace from her jaw, up and around her hair-line, and then she could peel off the skin. It is unlikely, she imagines, that it would come off in a complete mask. More probably, it would tear into strips, leaving patches of skin marring the red perfection of the underlying tissue. She thinks it would probably hurt.

Unlike most of her peers, she doesn't have a "thing" for shoes. She wears boots, solid and practical, anchoring her into the world. If she's dressed up for an occasion she'll have a cheap pair of heels, but since most of her skirts and dresses are black, she continues to use the pair her sister took her out to buy in preparation for a party. They're black, fairly low heeled, a thin strap around the back, a wide band across the front, toenails always painted (because she wanders around in bare feet as often as she can get away with it) and he knows they hurt her feet. He's seen her take them off for dancing, halfway through the evening, sitting out for a few minutes to massage them, freed from their bonds. He's wished it could be his hands giving her relief. He knows it never will be.

She looks like a princess tonight. She's out of the black, thank goodness (though I can't explain the relief I feel at that) and in a formal-looking ballgown, boned corset and full skirt, a deep rich blue. Automatically I look at her feet, and see there a new pair of shoes, higher than she's used to, somewhat precarious without an ankle strap, just the little straps attached to a "jewel" at the front. Cheap shoes. Odd, that this is the association I always carry away from seeing her out of normal clothes - cheap shoes. Normally she'll be in her hard-wearing good-quality boots, but dress her up and she goes all flashy. Probably because she doesn't get many chances to dress up. She's nervous about the shoes, I can tell. Thinks she's going to trip and fall because of her silly little shoes, sprain an ankle so she can't dance for weeks and wouldn't that just be death to her...

She dances behind closed doors, in secret, better than she dances in public where she always feels eyes on her (that are not there) moving with a grace and fluidity that turns her into something inhuman. Dances in bare feet, rising and falling, dances in heels to get used to it so she won't make a fool of herself, dances in boots when the urge takes her and she doesn't have time to take them off. Bare feet are more comfortable for her, but the boots are safer and sometimes she wants to sleep in them. Big clumpy heavy things, holding her down. Protection.

She doesn't want to be the weak one, but she thinks she always will.
Her ideal man is the protector archetype, from the physical attributes to the confidence.
She wants to be the strong one, just some of the time.
She wants to be an equal.
She'll always be the weak one, the self-pitying one.
So she won't get her ideal man. She'll get the traditional husband who'll want her to play the little woman and have not a thought to call her own.
And she thinks she could get used to that.
She knows she's screwed.

She sits at the computer. Reads some. Types some. Don't know what it is but I know she doesn't like it, 'cause the more she types the slower and more forceful her fingers get, like she knows it's not right but she has to keep going, 'cause maybe if she does then she'll find the stuff that works. It's an escape, she says. She knows it's crap and it never lasts - she'll have thirty files each with a couple of hundred words, instead of a few files with actual-length stories. I read them, sometimes, in the mornings and the afternoons when she's huddled in her bed. Vampire hours, she keeps, to go with the vampire stories she reads. That's not all she reads - fantasy, sci-fi, fanfic for every show she watches down to the cartoons (and man, but it's funny to see the way she yells at the computer when it's the wrong couple together, 'cause while she's a shipper through and through there are some things she just does not tolerate) - but the vamps are her favourites. So I wake up early, tele-commuting the working day, and I send her to bed, and if I take five minutes off working so I can read her latest work, who cares? And if the stuff she writes makes me cry for the girl she once was: who's there to see?

Where is she going? They neither know nor care. They know she is the strange one. She is the one who swam in the sea one January night. She is the one who walks the beach alone. She is the one who cut her own hair three times in a year. She is the one who takes care of herself. So they don't need to worry. And they don't care that she leaves without a word as she passes them. And they don't ask where she's been.

She keeps a bottle of the cheapest vodka she can find, that is neither as smooth nor as flavoursome as some of the others on the desk in her room. She mixes it with Cola - the supermarket own brand which costs fifteen pence for two litres. She drinks often, but not too much, and she eats chocolate and bread and the cheaper brand of flavoured noodles. She is not an alcoholic yet, but she may well be a miser.

She turns up for class in a white shirt, collar size fifteen-and-a-half. It means nothing. It just happens to be what she has decided to wear, this day. A mens' shirt but not a man's shirt, because that would denote an intimacy that she thinks she couldn't deal with, and a lack of fore-sight that has never been hers: her with her curse of extraneous over-analysing thought. It is simply a shirt, loose and flowing and disguising her form, but with the top three buttons open leaving a deeper V-neck than she has on any of her nice girly tops. An exercise in dichotomy. Two things that do not match, yet still fit her personality perfectly. She wears shirts.

She carries a razor blade in the small pocket of her jeans - the pocket inside a pocket that isn't useful for anything except maybe a couple of emergency coins, the one that nobody uses, that is simply there for style. She uses it for her blade. It is not the only one she carries - there is another one hidden in the inside pocket of each of her coats - but it is the one she uses most often. When she gets up and walks away from the table, leaving her belongings behind as she strolls casually towards the toilets, the blade is with her. When she swings around the corner and hides in the stall on the near end, quickly bolting the door with a trembling hand, the blade is with her. When she pushes down her jeans and slices oh-so-lightly across the top of her thigh with suddenly steady fingers, the blade is with her. in her. and all she ever wanted.

She talks to herself, as she walks down the street, and glares at the people whose attention it draws. They don't understand. She has to verbalise, simply has to, because if she doesn't manage to put it into words then it won't be real, it'll just fester inside her, feeding poison throughout her mind, making her crazy unless she just gets it the hell out. So she walks and she talks and she knows that they'll forget as soon as she's gone, and she's glad. Her words mean nothing to anyone but herself. Maybe she likes it that way.

She writes poetry on her hand, on her arm, on her belly and her legs. Robert Frost crawls up her shin as Rebecca Elson skirts across her hip. Catullus vies with Emily Dickinson for the rare patch of visible skin. Her mother's favourite poem scrolls down her breast as the lyrics of a punk band scream along her ribs. And she poses in the mirror, reading the reflection with the ease of long association, reciting lines as she traces the ink with her finger, thinking of people and places and small associations, the power of words and the way the rhythm of them sings in her veins. She likes poetry.