She moved away from everything that was, everything that could have been, and everything that still tried to cling. Always moving, never lingering. The past threw its reminders at her feet, but none of them were worth gathering. A slate wiped clean was all that mattered, for time was not to be wasted—it was to be devoured.
Idle hands were not hers. She was no sloth, no ghost of the down-trodden. She belonged to movement, to tasks that burned with purpose, to the relentless march of becoming.
They once told her she would never be satisfied. But such words were born from those who had no aspiration, no horizon beyond their own walls. Advice from hollow souls is no advice at all. She kept her storms within, turned them to embers, and forged her answers alone. Around her, people created monsters from the air, building cages of chaos to feel at home in the noise. She had lived there once, yes—but she had left. And she would not return.
Forward was her vow. Reverse had been erased from her tongue.
When the past circled back, it came in two forms: reminders of why it was severed, or stragglers who finally caught her pace. Most often, it was the latter. They looked at her and said: she has changed. They were not wrong. She had sharpened into something they no longer recognized.
Her life had become a narrow corridor of fire. Determination. Dedication. Focus. Nothing else was permitted. Between what was now and what would be, she allowed only the work of her own hands.
They whispered that she should be longing for love. A love mad and deep, the kind that chained one soul to another, the kind that turned wolves into begging dogs. But such love had come and gone in her youth, and in its ruins she discovered the truest revelation: it was always her. The one she was waiting for. The fire she sought in another was her own flame all along.
Perhaps it was because she had grown up watching others treat love like a fleeting intoxication, something weaker than habit. Or perhaps it was because her spirit had never known how to kneel in cages. Or perhaps, simply, it was because she was the black sheep—the one who was always meant to walk apart.
And so, she fell in love with the shadow in the mirror. With the strength in her step. With the untamed fire that no one else could hold. It was not a love born of desperation or hunger. It was not borrowed from another heart.
It was the rarest love of all: the love of self, fierce and eternal.
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