quiet words hurt the most

sad |sad|
adjective (sad der, sad dest)
1. feeling or showing sorrow; unhappy
     • causing or characterizing by sorrow or regret; unfortunate and regrettable
2. pathetically inadequate or unfashionable


    she always hated dictionaries, and thesauruses or any type of book that hijacked reality and compromised understanding for ordering, categorizing, and labeling labeling labeling;
she kept the horrid thick-bound paper backs bookmarked with the most pathetic definitions, and now she was studying these typed catastrophes for any trace of connection from her to the printed words on the page.
    "sad."
    the tears contracting in her lungs and despair clawing up her throat proved her sorrow, and the misery slowly churning with her stomach acids and was slowly tearing her insides apart.
but she didn't show it. as her organs were failing, and skin cells disintegrating;
her tear ducts stayed empty. so one thing that they did get right, she was pathetically inadequate and her heart strained in her decaying rib cage.
    no 'showing sorrow' for her, she didn't fit into the category of 'sad', and according to her leather bound book, she wasn't sad at all. but she wasn't despairing, disconsolate, glum or fucking down in the dumps; she was sad and there's no goddamn definition on that.
    in anger (a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility) she threw the dictionary at the darkened wooden panels of her floor boards and watched the words pool up.
    gazing at the scattered mess on her floor, and seeing 'fascination' and 'obliterate' peeking through pages, she always thought she kept the horrid book to prove that she was reality, that her life was not chained to simple definitions and lived beyond the black and white.
    but what if that wasn't what she was trying to prove?
    was she really reality?
    or was she just slowly falling back into categories and labels?
    who was she?
    who was she anymore?
    
    well, he was a cliche, an overstatement whose quiet words pecked apart her battle wounds instead of sterilizing them. he looked at her with strange eyes and called her beautiful,
    "beauty is awakening a longing in your heart." she says
    "beauty is a combination of qualities that pleases the aesthetic senses." he says
    well what the hell was she supposed to know? she never knew how to define herself, how to see herself. her insides were colliding in masses of self-pity and ugly ugly ugly; she refused to look in mirrors because they only way she saw herself was by turning her body inside out and to let him count the faulty veins. her reflection was seen through the soft words of a stranger who took her heart and hid it in pages of dictionaries.
    but she cracked through the spine, ripped through paper and tore through his labels.
    her life was not chained to simple definitions, she lived beyond the black and white.
    she was reality.
    she was.