Cora gripped the scissors, feeling hysterical anger boiling in her blood. She stared at them seeing her own reflection. A mirror of a face. Her face. The wild untamed hair flipped in every direction causing a hot lava of frustration course through her body. She grabbed the strands without thinking and cut them. Gripping the scissors like they were her savior. Staring at her feet, she kept cutting, wanting to see more and more hair fall on the pale, tiled floor. When Cora finished she examined herself in the mirror. It was a new start, while Elvis Presley played in the background she cleaned the pieces of her old self from the floor.

Her hair was caught between the tiles. She kept trying to clean it, but they wouldn’t budge. Her determination was boiling higher every second. However, she felt freer, having the air lick the back of her neck caused her to shiver. A feeling of delight crawled up her spine, making her tremble uncontrollably. It was like somebody unlocked her cage. A cage with bars made of the thoughts of other people, her mother’s orders, her own obsessive rules. They were all gone, and there was just her alone with her thoughts.

She started to question the reality. It was destructive she knew. Doubting everything that she had so far could destroy her, but she couldn’t help it. The truth was painful and it went against everything she told herself. The truth is that she didn’t hate her mother and her requests weren’t obsessive. Her brother was just young. And the boy she liked was nice. He wasn’t fake, he wasn’t gay and he surely didn’t do any of the things he did because he wanted to torture her. She was the one torturing herself. She spilled an acid of thoughts on her own eyes everyday looking at the mirror whispering to herself.

“I just wanna be perfect.”

Just to collapse and discover the truth. Nobody was perfect, but it was hard to admit if you never tried.

Her knees slowly raised her up. The mirror seemed to crack, her hair was…. Her hair. She looked at them, discovering every inch, biting her own tongue not to say the word “ugly”. That would kill her. The hair was very uneven; it was longer in some parts and shorter in other. It looked like she has jumped into a scissor fight. Her fingers slowly caressed every hair, it was delicate and soft. Like a blooming flower. It didn’t hide her face from the world anymore.
For the first time she started to look at her facial features, they were hers. The words “pretty” and “ugly” were not in her dictionary anymore, her face was hers and hers alone. That’s why it was special. Because nobody on the planet had the same features as she did. Cora’s lips spread into a smile, lightning her face.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to her reflection.

Once the hair was picked up and the bathroom was clean, Cora went into her room. It was not her style; too dull and colorless. Her heart begged to do something with that horse picture on the wall. But the most annoying thing at that moment, were the blinds on her windows. They blocked the world from her. They made the room a lonely cave, a black box filled with choking air. Her hands quickly grabbed the long string and pulled it as hard as they could. The shields jumped up, opening the world to her. With a feeling of disgust washing over her, she looked out the window. Her eyes were met with the same horrible scene that she saw everyday for the past 16 years. Cora bit her lip in annoyance.

She felt her heart pulsing with anger and her barriers immediately stood up. Barriers that didn’t allow her to do anything stupid, barriers that held her up for all these years. Barriers that were created from anger, tears and irritation. With a screeching shout of frustration, they started to crumble, block by block. Each fallen piece turned into black dust and disappeared in the uncontrolled storm of her mind.

Cora slowly walked towards the bookshelf. With each step her feet caressed the smooth wooden floor. The gaze of her hollow eyes rested upon a bookshelf filled to the brim with books that she never read but still kept to show her non-existent intelligence. With a voiceless scream, she shoved them all off the bookshelf, most of them landed on the floor or on the bed. Some pages got ruined but she still didn’t care, continuing onto the next row of books. She had no mercy for the colorful candles or the photo frames either, they crashed on the floor with a thundering noise. The sound of shattered glass and the pain in her left foot didn’t stop her from destroying another shelf.

“No changes.” She roared. “Stupid F***ING books!”

They went flying around the room. Hitting the shelves on the other side. The porcelain figures crumbled into a thousand pieces, covering the floor in vibrant colors. She felt dissatisfaction sting her heart, as her eyes moved to the other part of the room. Except for the broken glass laying on the floor, it looked normal, too normal.

There was pure adrenaline running through her body when she grabbed her laptop with both hands and smashed it on the floor. F***ing spoiled rich bastards. Who was she trying to impress buying such an expansive laptop?

She stopped herself from killing her iPod, since her iTunes was gone, her iPod was the only source of music. Her “ring for a hug” bell was broken into 2 pieces. She didn’t want a f***ing hug at that time.

Finally she got to the horse poster. It was too heavy to be thrown or broken so she decided to do something else. Something that would be more entertaining for her dark soul. Grabbing the scissors she cut a line in the poster dividing the horse’s neck in half. The line wasn’t deep, she kept going. Digging the scar deeper and deeper. Tears started falling from her eyes.

“Why don’t you just die you stupid horse!?”

It was always there when she was in pain, when she cried. It always stared at her from the wall. She didn’t want anything to remind her of those days. She felt warm liquid flow down her fingers, staining the massacred horse.

Feeling defeated, Cora’s legs gave out. She stared at her art.
The horse’s eye was ripped off. He was covered in scratches and blood. Cora looked around at what she had done. The room was absolutely massacred. There were scratches on the walls. Glass shards and books smeared with blood laid motionlessly on the floor.

A room, a cage, a resemblance to her consciousness. It was just as chaotic and disorganized as her damaged mind. So destroyed like the horse. So dark like the sky outside and so scary like the whole state of the moment.

Cora didn’t know what to do next, she just sat there staring at the symbol of her mind. So open and so easy to change. She didn’t want to get rid of the poster that used to be a horse, because it was a part of her deep down. So it remained there, torn to pieces just like her heart.
All the anger drained from her body, leaving Cora feeling numb and empty. There were no more tears left to cry. Just the emptiness, like a dark cave it echoed her calls. She desperately searched for any kind of emotions. A hollow silence answered her. Cora’s eyes closed while the agony gradually started to flow out of her body. It mixed with the blood and created a puddle of despair and death that stained her warm wooden floor...