Story 7 - The lies we tell

She loved these words. She almost longed for them when she did not have a chance to say them, she soughed an opportunity and, once found, she licked her lips, felt her heart pound a tat stronger, touched her hair slightly (it made her feel smarter and even more right), and said them. Tasting and measuring every word in her mouth, joggling them, giving them out and swallowing them back, like a long-lost part of her, part of that spiteful and broken  little girl that she once was, (she still was?).

Whenever she felt the sharpening, lucrative chance for the words, she lingered about in anticipation, solemn apprehension that the storm is here, on the verge, about to break out, and she is there to witness it. She is there to declare it. 

She would smoke a cigarette first (this also made her look clever, or independent, or at least that is how she experienced it). She would give a half-broken smile, not even, a smirk, a miniature signal of her triumph over.. over what? Over that little girl hiding inside her, despising those words so strongly, it would almost give her physical pain to utter the phrase. That felt good in a twisted way as well. 

This one time, however, she wasn’t sure. This time it was about that little girl inside her, that scared, lost, unsure girl that put up enormous shields just awaiting for the right moment to recover, reveal the raw essence of what her soul was, but never finding the right moment or the right place or the right cup of coffee. 

She knew that this time was different. This time she might have been wrong. 

She still said it though. This was the routine, the drill, the exercise needed to be executed. 

She said it. “I knew it would not work out”.

She was, however, finally, crucially, excruciatingly wrong. It did work out this time.

The peace freed her, she finished the cup of coffee, hung up the phone and properly smiled.