There’s no elective in high school on how to be a teenage girl, or how to grow into a “successful” woman. Constantly surrounded by perfection and “womanly values,” she feels like there is no room to breathe.

Yet, hell is a teenage girl, and that girl lives in a sea of chaos. 

Animated by a society of thick, dense expectations, she roams the Earth constantly devoured by the monsters she fears. Insecurity becomes darkness. Mental isolation turns into loneliness. She breathes, she pushes, though barely, she stays afloat. 

Self-doubt is temporary. Beauty is timeless, or at least it tries to be. She wants so badly to be seen as beauty, yet she feels she is the exact opposite. It is she who defines her own beauty, but it is she who, in reality, drowns in a deep, dark void of nothingness. So strange that nothing can be everything at the exact same time. 

Her world crumbles slowly, sludging off the edge into the void of the galaxy, never to be seen again. The past struggles to submerge. She regresses. Each day drags on; so does she. Slowly, but surely, life unfolds, and all she can do is accept fate.

She doesn’t want to be content. She never wanted this to happen. What happened to the innocence of youth? What happened to being happy with herself? She couldn’t. She can’t. She drowns in a sea of stars and blackness. 

Anger consumes her faster than an incandescent flame. She tries to contain every last bit of bright, orange fury, but just as she struggles to quell the hell surrounding her, she struggles to contain the fire.

The anger fuels. The melancholy drains. The traffic on her life’s road travels painfully slow. Emotional traffic lights. Red anger. Yellow pain. Green—get over yourself. 

What are you doing? Why are these simple words taking over your life?

Emotion devours like a starved carnivore. Her mind fogged with the plague of it all.

She shouldn’t have to live contently this way, yet she does… Why is that?

Pain is a tainted affliction that is a natural part of life. That’s that. 

She lets it seep into the cracks of the good, the bad, the void she so vividly fears. 

While misery never fails to make an appearance, she doesn’t win every battle. 

Hell sometimes feels as though she might be the light coming down to take away the darkness for a while.

It gets old, being in a slump you know.

It’s about time she takes hell by the reins.