Stories

Prompt 1: A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

She walked into the tiny women’s washroom, debating whether to look in the mirror or to close her eyes and just wash her blood-stained hands. She stared at the door adjacent to the mirror, demanding answers from the inanimate object. Sighing, she placed her trembling hands under the freezing water.

They’re shaking because it’s cold. That’s normal. She told herself.

Don’t lookup. 

Her heartbeat is spiked.

Shut your eyes.

Her legs grew weak.

 Don’t look in the mirror.

Oxygen left her lungs.

 Don’t-

Distira crashed into someone’s shoulder and jolted from the two-year-old memory. Her wireless headphones left their secure grip around her head and chose to blare electronic music to the uninterested grass instead.

“Woah slow down there,” the man with whom she had collided said from somewhere above her.

She placed her hands on her knees and panted, trying to burn holes in the pavement below from her stare. Blood. Red. She forced herself to look up and noticed the sun peeking through the leaves of a ….. casting a golden glow on half of her face in an uneven pattern.

“You oka-“ the man stopped short when Distira turned around and looked at him.

“I’m so sorry, I uh-“ she made a swishing movement on her right wrist in an attempt to command her brain to come up with an excuse but all she could imagine was her brain saying ‘you are on your own’. She exhaled a breath she didn’t know she was holding and shook her head, “I’m sorry.”

She gazed at the man, truly taking in his appearance for the first time. The guy appeared to be in his mid-twenties. He had an angular face with a sharp jawline and a clean shaved beard. He was roughly a foot taller than her and had slightly curly brunette hair. He wore a sleeveless black hoodie and grey jogger pants paired with dark grey running shoes. A classic she thought.

Distira brunched her eyebrows, “I think I’ve seen you somewhere,”

The guy’s lips formed an amusing smile but then he shifted to a more serious expression, bunching his eyebrows and pouting his lips, as if deep in thought.

Distira watched in bewilderment.

“Apparently,” he started, “people who study at the same college and stay in the dorms have a common ground for physical exercises. Who knew” he looked at her with an innocent face.

Distira rolled her eyes. Mind doing your job? You stupid, stupid brain!

She made a move to pick up her headphones from the ground. Stretching to her full length she noticed a fresh cut on the guy’s right bicep.

“You got a cut right there,” she motioned towards his upper arm.

The male looked down to examine his arm. “Yeah, I think I got that from your ring when you ran into me”

Distira pressed her lips in a straight line. She scanned him from head to toe again.

“I got a Band-Aid in my room. It’s right around the block.” She said with a face of indifference.

“Are you inviting?” He smirked.

“Are you denying?” It was her time to mirror the expression.

The guy pulled his hands up in surrender. “Lead the way, miss-“

“Distira”

“Gareth”

They exited the ground and rounded the block. Reaching the first building on the left marked “C”, they made their way up the stairs.

“Your elevator doesn’t work as well?”

“Isn’t that a specialty of this place? Besides, I prefer the stairs.” Gareth only hummed in response.

Reaching the fourth-floor landing, Gareth asked, “Why haven’t I ever seen you in any of the college events?”

“Never participated in any.”

“Why?”

She shrugged and led them to the very end of the hallway.

“You must dance or model or do aerobics or something,” Gareth inquired as Distira produced a single key from her shorts pocket and opened the door.

Something tugged at her heart.

“What would give you that impression?”

“Your posture, the way you walk, the sway of your hips. Your perfect makeup. You have an air of confidence and of course, you got the socially desirable body for it.” he said as he made he stepped into the room.

Distira placed her headphones, mobile, and key on the study table. Gareth took in her room. There were at least twenty paintings lying around. Some in a photo frame, others just on canvas. None of them hung on the wall though. Each frame rested against a surface. A few paintbrushes littered one of the two chairs placed beside the study table.

“Confidence? Even though I struggled to get words out of my mouth when I ran into you?”

“I would say that was because of my irresistible charm but I would be wrong. You were just deep in thought and needed time to get out of it.”

“What are you, a stalker?”

“Keen observant”

Distira made her way to the bathroom debating whether she should lie and make this evening uncomfortable or fetch the guy sitting on her bed a piece of truth and get over with it. Returning with the first-aid kit in hand, she chose the latter.

“I used to model in high school and when I was an undergraduate. I left.”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t excite me as much as it used to.”

“That can’t be true.”

Distira looked up picking out the Band-Aid and felt the weight of Gareth’s intense eyes on her.

“You’re irritating.”

Peeling off the protective wrapping, she slapped the adhesive bandage of Gareth’s arm with a force that would probably make a six-year-old cry. She stood up from her bed and moved to the window beside her bedpost and shut the blinds.

“Get the covers.” she motioned towards the other chair about two feet away from where Gareth was sitting but he made no movement to retrieve the said item. When Distira turned around to get them, he grabbed her hand and motioned for her to sit.

“Tell me.” He said in a very quiet voice. He didn’t let go of her hand as he noticed a war rage behind the girl’s pine green eyes.

She didn’t want to. She never told anybody. Even when she retired as the president of the fashion club in her UG college, she didn’t tell anyone the truth. They understood the reason when they saw her, but nobody knew why. No one tried to bring her back. Such is the world of ‘beautiful people’. But somewhere deep down the words were rattling the bars she put them in. Her mind split into a riot.

“In the middle of my 5th semester, I was going back home from an internship program. I was walking to the nearest bus stop when I saw a puppy following me. I don’t mind dogs but I’m more of a cat person. Now more than ever hah”

Somehow, the thought of opening up to a complete stranger seemed a lot more appealing than telling her photographer why she won’t be a part of any more projects.

“I thought the pup would go away if I walked faster but he started running and I almost stepped on him. I’m assuming it was a ‘him’ because isn’t it a norm that boys are naughtier than girls,” she pouted before continuing, “Anyway, I looked back and found his brothers and sister staring after him. So I started walking towards them hoping that he would follow me, but the bastard didn’t. Seriously what goes on in their mind?”

She tried to lighten the conversation. For her sake. This wasn’t easy.

“Well, I didn’t have much choice. I crouched down to pick him up to take him back to his brothers and sisters. And… it all happened so fast, one moment I saw his mother running towards me barking, the next I was on the ground with the dog biting the side of my stomach. Some people around noticed and came to my aid. They shooed her away and helped me up. And then I spit blood. I’m terrified of blood. That’s why I don’t paint red anymore. I haven’t been diagnosed but I’m pretty sure I have homophobia. That’s where everything started to blur. I couldn’t understand what was happening.”

She remembered black and white dots dancing in her vision and a faint beep sound in her ears.

“This kind woman stopped a taxi and took me to the nearest hospital. She called my parents and even waited with me till they came. Nurses rushed to me and tried to clean my wounds. Did a terrible job, if I may add.

“I don’t remember much but that’s what I was told anyway. I think I snapped back when I saw my mother. I looked down at my hands and there was blood on them.”

She remembered the pain all too well. Not just the physical one. She had tried to speak when she saw her parents but no words came out. It hurt. Her throat croaked and tears stained her face but she couldn’t speak. Her mother tried to soothe her telling her it’ll be okay but her glossy eyes narrated a different story. Her father talked to a nearby nurse. Distira almost felt relieved. She was afraid of what she would see in his eyes. She couldn’t handle that right then.

“The doctor came and started debriefing my parents. That’s when I realized why I couldn’t speak, why I spit blood. I had a wound on my lower lip and chin. Apparently, the dog first attacked my face and then went for my stomach. Hours passed as different types of doctors came by and assessed my situation. The plastic surgeon was the worst. She suggested plastic surgery because ‘my face was ruined’.

“Of course it mattered to me. My face, my body. I worked hard every day to maintain my shape. My parents knew this and that’s why they didn’t allow me to see my face when I took out my phone from my jeans pocket. But later I had to go to the washroom and eventually saw it.”

She had heard the story of her father naming her more than a hundred times. He named her Distira because it meant to glow. The first time he saw his little baby in the hospital, that’s what came to his mind. The glow on his wife’s face, the glow on his two elder twin sons’ face, the glow that little girl brought to his family. So he fought with his wife who had previously decided on Lissana and eventually they had to settle it by rock-paper-scissors. Now she believed she didn’t glow anymore because how could she, she had so many scars.

“The doctors didn’t give me stitches because dog bite heals when left open or else it would develop an infection. So it took a couple of months for the scars to make my skin color and then I started covering them up with makeup.”

“One would say I’m a hypocrite as I left modeling because I thought I wasn’t pretty anymore. But I didn't want to 'mend' myself as if I was broken. I will laugh in this body I was born in."

She finished with a sad smile on her face, staring at the floor.

“Look at me.”

She didn’t. She knew her eyes would give her away if she did.

Gareth moved closer to the edge of the bed and lifted up her chin.

“Does it matter?”

What?” she looked up.

“Does it matter that you’re not pretty?”

Distira didn’t know what to say. She just stared at the guy before her who looked genuinely serious about his question.

“No. It doesn’t. What matters is you thinking you’re not pretty.” He stated. His hand still securing hers in a warm embrace.

She just stared into Gareth’s dark yellow freckled hazel eyes. They were beautiful.

Gareth reached out and pulled Distira’s hair out of her bun, letting them fall over her shoulders. He then tugged at her oversized shirt. She looked at him with questioning eyes but he gave her a trust me to look and she obliged. He pulled her shirt over her head and kept it aside. He then grabbed her shoulders and motioned for her to get up. He directed her towards the body length mirror at the paintings covered dressing table and noted the absence of red color.

He snaked his arms around her waist and pulled down her running shorts.

She stepped out of them absentmindedly as a patch of skin on the left side of her stomach occupied her mind. He turned her towards the mirror and stood behind her.

“Why do you want to be pretty,” he combed his hand through her hair, dividing them into two equal segments and let them fall over her breasts, “When you can be beautiful.”

Distira stared at her reflection. The warm summer sun tried to peak through the binds and settled to illuminate a rectangular section of the wooden floor below the window.

She stood there in the sunlit room before the mirror in her blue-grey sports bra and grey sports briefs. Where on normal days her first thought looking into the mirror was her blood-stained face, this time she saw a girl with long toned legs, an hourglass torso, strong arms, and soft wavy auburn hair.

“You would think,” Gareth whispered in her ears from behind while running his fingertips down her side “this face, this body makes you pretty.” He set his hands on the curve of her waist and met her eyes in the mirror.

“But what makes you beautiful,”

Distira felt as if she was in a trance. She couldn’t move, only stare and listen.

“Is the stories that have molded you into who you are.”

He held her right hand and turned her palm up. “Remember the feeling of holding your paintbrush and working out the angle to paint on the canvas, trying to get that small detail right. How many times did you mess up and try again? How happy were you when you finally got it right?”

He moved up to her delicate collarbone and traced his fingertips over them, extending to the back of her neck, never once leaving her eyes in the mirror.

“Sexy huh, but do you remember the struggle of getting the hook in that right slot to get the perfect length of your choker or pendant”

She could picture all the hooks that had died by her hand in an attempt to find the desired ring slot and the relief that washed over her when she managed to get it right after minutes of cursing and bending her head at weird angles.

He slid down his right index finger from her neck dent, over her sports bra and rested it in the middle of her cleavage. He stifled a laugh before continuing.

“Remember your first bra?”

That was all she heard before diving into another memory. She pictured her twelve-year-old self struggling to hook her first bra behind her back in the stall of a lingerie store. She couldn’t do it and had to ask her mother for assistance. And the feeling of being choked on thin air, oh she could never forget that.

“Was that pretty?” Gareth spoke behind her. His smiling eyes pulling her back to the present.

“Remember the maximum squats you did to tame this ass and how your legs felt like the next day.”

She did.

He went on listing off things one after the other as memories resurfaced in Distira’s mind. She was captivated.

“Do you now understand how beautiful you are? How do you expect others to accept you when you can’t do that yourself? You don’t need a man to make you appreciate yourself.”

He pulled back his right hand and clasped it with his left behind his back, resting his head on her right shoulder.

“At least that’s what feminists would tell you.” He added with a wink.

Distira stared into the mirror for what felt like hours, contemplating every word, every story this stranger standing behind her had narrated. She took in a deep breath and turned around to face the guy who just laid out the story of her life in mere minutes. She raised herself on her toes and kissed the guy. Both of them knew it carried the words she couldn’t put into words.

She would see him. Even though they never met after that day, she remembered his words when called her ex-photographer to set a meeting, when she walked the ramp for the first time in her final year of post-graduation, when she tried to mix a little red paint with white in order to make pink, and all the other times she thought she couldn’t do something. He was there with another story in her mind.