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“Don’t worry, little girl. I’ll make everything alright.”

He soothed her with candy and fading distractions, comforts worn thin too early, like denim fraying before autumn had the chance to whimper its arrival and before spring could decide whether to bloom again. Every ache was pushed aside with another diversion, another glittering object, another soft denial disguised as care.

Do not look there.
Do not feel that.
Do not welcome yourself home.

As she grew older, the distractions simply changed their clothing. Sugar became ambition. Ambition became performance. Performance became substances, relationships, achievements, endless movement. New drugs born from old instructions: look the other way. Stay busy. Stay desirable. Stay distracted enough not to hear the deeper hunger beneath your own breathing.

Society handed out prescriptions for living as though existence itself required choreography. Do this. Don’t do that. Feel this much, but never too much. Grieve politely. Desire carefully. Dream only within approved dimensions. Most people moved through life waiting to be told who to become, like audiences mesmerized by magicians forcing foreign dreams down their throats, dreams that never fully fit, never fully belonged to them.

And she could not do it.

She, the black sheep wandering through the polished fantasies of her friends, began carving a path not toward what had been lost, but toward what had been buried beneath obedience. Beneath performance. Beneath generations of pretending.

The Joneses, she realized, must have known all along how unbearably dull perfection truly was. Why else spend so much energy protecting the illusion of it? Their immaculate lawns, rehearsed smiles, curated happinesses; all of it trembling quietly beneath the weight of its own performance.

And somewhere inside the collapse of that illusion, she felt something unexpected begin to breathe.

Not rebellion for its own sake.

But the terrifying possibility that life might become beautiful the moment she stopped trying to perfect it.