October 7, 2007; location unknown
Willow stands in front of the mirror for a long time. It is as though she will never be able to see her reflection again: she’s trying to memorize what she looks like.
She doesn’t recognize herself! That’s the worst part. Willow can remember her hair, now, what it used to look like. Perfectly straight and smooth, an almost glowing brown until she tinted it and then it was red, a brilliant red-orange with gold highlights. It shone in the sun, she remembers, and people always used to comment on it, how natural it looked; but this isn’t natural, what she’s seeing now.
It’s black, a dark midnight black that makes her look pale, dead. How on earth can her hair be black, how can it have changed so much? Her eyebrows are black, too, her eyelashes. She doesn’t understand. It’s like her genes have been changed, or something, but that’s not possible.
Neither is SomePlace Else, though.
Willow furrows her eyebrows in confusion and leans forward slightly, staring at her face. She’s so skinny! How is it she’s so skinny? It seems to Willow that she can remember a time when she was healthier-looking, when she could never be called fat but she had some flesh left. She can see all of her bones—the sharp joints of her elbows, her collarbone jutting forward, stretching the skin taut, her breasts lying flat above her ribs. She’s never been able to count her ribs before.
And there are scars.
She doesn’t realize what’s wrong with her stomach, at first, besides the fact that it’s abnormally concave. The way the light falls on it is strange, but…
The problem is the scars. They’re an intricate spider’s web of thick, shiny raised skin. Willow can remember a long, long time ago when all that was there was smooth soft flesh, lightly tanned, and a tiny puckered scar above and to the left of her belly button where a mole used to be. She can’t see her mole-scar at all, anymore.
Her hair is completely wet, dripping uncomfortably down the backs of her legs. Willow sighs and pulls her hair into a heavy ponytail, lifting it to bring it over her shoulder, to cover up her scars, but then she pauses, letting the blackness she holds catch the light.
Her hair isn’t black, it’s red like… like blood. She almost expects the water pooling on the tiles at her feet to be a marbled bloody red. Nobody has hair this color, hair so red it’s black. It’s a mutation or something, it has to be. And it’s so long—Willow’s hair hasn’t been this long since she was five, before her mother made her cut it, and then it was thin and straggly. Her new hair is thicker than it’s ever been, and wavy.
She’s never noticed before, somehow. Greg usually brushes her hair out for her, but hair this wavy has got to be a bitch to untangle. Willow tries to run a hand through it and sighs. She needs to brush this out before it dries. She knows Greg has some conditioner, somewhere.
With a last look at her forlorn, starved reflection, Willow draws the blue velvet curtain back.
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