She left a trail of wreckage everywhere she went. Hearts trampled, lives in ruin, and she just kept moving forward. She didn't do it on purpose. She didn't relish it. She didn't even know it had happened most of the time.
She didn't care.
Kate, never Katherine, put herself first. She was narcissistic and self-serving. She did what she wanted, when she wanted, and she didn't think any further than that.
Kate hated herself. Not because she hurt people or thought only of herself, though. She hated herself because in her eyes she was as imperfect as a person could be. She hated her hair and her smile. She loathed the little extra weight she had gained last winter and couldn't shake, and she hated the way her arms looked in tank tops. She felt dumb. She believed the world was against her and that the only way to survive was to stand steadfastly against the world.
She was plagued with indecisiveness, and still never seemed to choose correctly. School, work, sex. It didn't matter. She'd find a new passion, get bored, and move on. She didn't go back to things or give them a second shot. Her house was filled with half-finished projects in media that previously held her attention. In her dining room, she kept an easel with a chalk drawing of half of a horse. Her dining room - which never held a table - was filled with instruments she never bothered to pick up. Her bedroom held the beginnings of comic book, documentary, and art house film collections. She hadn't even glanced at them since they were added to the appropriate pile.
Kate dated, a lot. She'd pick a guy for a few months, cheat on him a few times, and then somehow make him feel like he had messed everything up by caring too much. She'd walk away, and she would find someone new. Everyone she dated would have sworn they were in love, that their futures were intertwined, until the moment she unceremoniously ended it. Some were so unlucky they never got an official end. She'd just stop responding to texts, refuse to answer the door when they rang, and ignore their presence if they happened to end up in the same place. Poor guys never saw it coming.
She really didn't care, either. Her friends tried to understand. They would make up excuses for her, trying to console those left in the wake or to justify to themselves their friend's decisions. No one ever could grasp her apathy toward others. Even they often wondered if they would be ostracized next, deemed unworthy or unnecessary. Kate was hard to love, and yet everyone seemed to want to love her.
Kate didn't want to be loved by anyone that had ever showed he attention, save for one. She had lived the ultimate cliché. She had given her heart to a man - boy, really - who had held it in his hand just long enough for her to become comfortable, before he squeezed it until it burst. He threw it back into her face and told her she would never be good enough. He had no idea what he had created.
She had people who cared. People that wanted to be let in further, to get to know the gentle soul they thought they saw peeking out from the shadows. She leaned on them, sometimes, but she felt like she was unworthy of their time, and that they could never understand. Isolated, independent, self-reliant. Kate didn't like feeling indebted to someone. She didn't like feeling lesser. But she didn't know how to feel any other way, so she avoided it by just not letting people get close.
Kate was broken. She came across as arrogant, but inside she felt minuscule. She had given up trying to find a fix. Now she just focused on trying to survive.
10:31 pm. 18. 7. 13
