And when I need a reminder of what had been, I just dive into my memories and pretend that everything is okay.

FAITH

one
soundtrack : ecstasy – atb

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I'm afraid to fall because
falling means loving
loving means wanting
wanting means distance
and distance means hurting
and my heart is already fragile enough
coated in butterfly skin

I figure everyone makes mistakes at least once or twice in their life. Some people even make the same mistakes over and over until they get it right. Some people never get it right.

My mother was one of the people who never got it right.

She never learned from her mistakes.

She once told me, in one of her stupors, that I was the biggest mistake she'd ever made.

As my best friend, Ribbit, once said to me, “Some people are brought into this world just to be paradise birds – they come into this world to make it look good and easy. You can't ask more of a flower than to look beautiful.” I think Ribbit was right – and I apply this analogy to my mother, except she never made my life easy.

Easy just doesn’t come naturally to people like me.

I'm addicted to the feeling of my heart leaping when I see the stars. When I was younger, I used to dream that I could race out of the house and feel my spirit soar when I closed my eyes, stretched my arms out and fell forward onto the long grasses in the backyard. The grass would tickle my nose and I would rub my face in it just to feel that lightheaded feeling you get when you've sniffed one too many dandelions and you feel like your head is about to explode. After a lot of rubbing and tension building up in my head, feeling like I'm on the brink of releasing it all, it finally all comes out in one gratifying sneeze. Then I would giggle and everything would feel like it was right in the world again.

I've found out a lot of things over the period of my life and one of the most significant things has been that fairytales don't mesh well with real life. I am not a modern day Cinderella – I don't have a fairy godmother who can wiggle her nose or wave her wand and everything will be okay.

If I could be any character not my own, I would be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. She was in another world and all she had to do to get home was find some red shoes, put them on and click her heels together. I'd tried all the tricks in the world, everything the characters in the fairytales had done to escape their worlds and none had come down to leaving mine.

I sometimes think that my own mother is stuck in her own world just as I am in mine. I'm trapped in my own imagination, amongst the spirits and colours and spirals that make up my dreams. My hopes are as clear as day but once I venture out into the real world, they dissipate and I'm left with nothing. She's the ball and chain around my ankle, the only thing that keeps me here – I have this insistent urge that I have to take care of her and it all comes down to that because if I don't, who will? Her boyfriends that leave as fast as they come? Her mother? Her father? None of them are even involved in her life anymore. I'm the only person she has left and even I'll be leaving soon. She'll be all alone and I don't think she'll even notice.

That makes me a little sad.

Nowadays my life consists of waking up at 6am in the morning to catch the milkman to see if I can flirt my way into getting a little extra milk from him because my mother comes home in her stupors and collapses into her bed at 3am. Sometimes she doesn't even make it to her bed, sometimes I find her curled up in front of the door, limbs haphazardly arranged on the steps, her head on the doorstop, her keys falling out of her pocket and drool coming out of the side of her mouth.

If there's one thing I've inherited from my mother, it's her looks. My mother can flirt her way into getting what she wants and she usually does. The society she's raised me in encourages her to get high whenever she can, wherever she can and when she's got nothing to get high on, she'll look to any sources she can get it from and do pretty much anything to get it. More than once, someone has turned up on our doorstep to claim something from my mother that she's incapable of giving because she's either, a: passed out, or, b: physically incapable of doing anything more than mumbling. If they can't get anything from her, they'll start trying to hit on me because I'm the spitting image of my mother and so, clearly, we must be two peas in a pod, right? Then reality rains down on them when they realise that I'm not the drug addict that my mother is and they get aggressive and I have to slam the door in their faces, bolt it and call the police.

I lifted my head and inhaled deeply, feeling the cool night air flowing into my lungs. It reeked of old smoke, urine and decay – a smell that I could never get used to. I'd been wandering in the twilight and my feet had brought me to the train station. It was here my mother used to bring me and we’d sit down on the seats and she’d point out all the people and tell me their life stories. It wasn’t that she had any idea who they were or what they were all about, but my mother used to have a knack for storytelling, something I guess she passed onto me.

My feet padded the pavement, nose twitching as the smells of cigarette smoke permeated my senses and my hair fell into my eyes. Raspy smokers' voices and the sounds of a lone train whooshing by reached my ears. It was almost 11pm and the last of the trains for the night were leaving.

Smokers were stationed around the waiting area; some congregated around a single lighter, some leaning against the wall. There was only one other thing they all had in common apart from their daily use of cigarettes and that was that they were all watching me.

You’d think they’d never seen a teenager hanging around the subway at night... I raised my hand and trailed my fingertips across the wall as I walked. It felt rough under them and scratched away skin. Blood started oozing from my fingertips and I only noticed this as I gazed at the reddish brown tracks my blood had made. Fuck.

I never understood why people could faint over something as simple as blood. Blood fascinated me – the very nature of it, the way it stained things, the way it went darker the longer it was outside of the body, how it hardened to form scabs... How something that protected us, that kept us living, could scare so many.

One of the smokers had her eyes on me. That girl, the circles around her eyes, the way she held the cigarette between her fingers, the way her lips pursed as she blew out the smoke... she was one of the people who came here to escape. Some people are just free spirits that way, their way of dealing with problems is to go somewhere where they won’t be judged for being what they are... free. If there’s one thing I’ve come to understand in life, it’s people like that.

We’re kindred spirits, them and I, floating in the sea of life.

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In front of me, I see a wisp of a girl. She’s slight, pointed in all the wrong places and her matted, blonde hair hangs in front of her face, acting as a barrier to a world that she doesn’t want to see any longer. I reach up and trace the side of her face with my finger, smudging the chalk pastel so that her hair runs into her face. She is me, and I am her. I lift the brown pastel with my other hand and press it into the paper so that her face becomes more visible. She shouldn’t be afraid to see the world for what it is – sometimes ugly, other times beautiful, but all of the time, very, very real.

Every day, I draw another self portrait. It’s a chronicle of my life of some sort. I change from day to day; each experience turns me into someone a little bit different.

Sometimes, though, I don’t know if the person I’m drawing is my mother or if it’s me.

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Hah, if there’s one thing I remember from when I was a kid, it was that the only friends I had were the imaginary ones. The only dependable ones, anyway. Why’s this? This is because whenever I made friends, I’d be too scared to bring them home because of my mother. I was scared that she would somehow turn them against me.

Why was I scared of this?

Looking back, I honestly don’t know. Maybe it was a seven year old’s irrational fears getting the best of her because she didn’t have the support systems in place to have higher self-esteem.

Maybe the pessimism (now) and my distinct lack of close friends is because I spend so much time looking after my own mother instead of her doing the same for me. The only friends I have nowadays are the ones I meet at the train station – like that girl with the dark eyes and the cigarette. I see her every day and I still don’t know her name.

She’s dark eyes girl to me.

But even though I don’t know her name, I know her story because it’s much like mine. We’re of the same world, the same life, and it scares me because it makes me realise that there isn’t a lot more out there for me in case I do something about it.

I have to chase down my dreams.

I have to reach for the stars and the moon because there’s no one there who will give me a boost to get there. There’s no one who’s willing to cup their hands under my foot and throw me up to the sky.

“Your name’s Faith, right?” dark eyes rasped at me.

I inhaled deeply, breathing in her cigarette smoke and the smells of the station. “Yea, that’s me. How’d you know?”

“He told me.” She jerked her head over at a man sitting on the bench behind us. “Says he knows you, says he wants to get to know you better.” She made a face. “If you know what I mean.”

I glanced over her shoulder at him and felt my heart quicken in my chest. A look of disgust almost found its way onto my face, but I schooled my facial expression back to calm and coolly replied, “Well, he’ll have to get in line with everyone else.”

She laughed a smoker’s laugh, all harsh yowls and wheezy coughs. “That’s a girl.”

Something about that laugh made me want to cringe away from the world.

Mask on, I told myself, smiled one of my fake smiles at her and turned on my heel. “Bye, dark eyes,” I threw over my shoulder. See you again, never, maybe.

“It’s Mel,” she threw back at me.

“Whatever,” I muttered under my breath and flapped a hand over my shoulder.

Dark eyes was all she was to me and all she would remain. Dark and unknowable.

You can’t run for the rest of your life, Faith.

I know that... you don’t have to tell me twice.

Oh, don’t I? The last time I looked, you weren’t doing much to carve out a life for yourself.

Just you watch then... watch me, I’ll carve out a life for myself and I’ll be on top of you and on top of the whole world.

And it was then I saw the headlights and realised, perhaps a split second too late, that I should pay more attention to where I’m walking.