Stealing beauty
A haute couture shop and a sex shop just opened up in town. Two shops I don't even like walking past.
Those places don't just offer nothing to someone like me, who dresses like a goddamned nun and veils herself in glamours to hide her twisted back, pasty skin and the gills at her neck, and who has long since let her sexuality go dormant because anything else is an exercise in futile self-torture. They're a reminder of the parts of normal human life I don't get to take part in. For a very long time, this was one of the things I used to support my general disgust with humans. Then came my time as a curer, and then the hurricane. Suddenly I couldn't afford blanket hatred and rejection of my father's race. It just...doesn't work anymore. I see them as individuals. And they...at least the male half...see me, exposed in my true form, as hideous, or at least unacceptable.
I was doing all right with my bitterness. But somehow, walking past those damned shops in the market square made me feel it again--a great wave of it.
The ironic thing is that I could be beautiful if I wanted to. I could straighten my back and make myself clean-limbed and fair. But I would have to steal that beauty from another person. And because beautiful women tend to be so emotionally fucking dependent on their looks, it would probably destroy her. Drive her insane. Hard price to ask someone to pay for my vanity.
But the world is vain--and cruel and petty. And when I went out today, I was reminded of that. Of the thing I do not possess...the one coin that buys love.
Accursed, empty beauty, which reflects nothing of the soul beneath and is granted with fickle randomness by the gods.
And for a terrible moment, I was tempted to steal it. So tempted that it hurt.
It seems I am not as good a person as I have been trying to be.