i'm not seventeen, but i've cuts on my knees.
When Hasibe finally goes home, for good this time, she is greeted by the old silence of her building's interior and the soft swish of cars outside rushing around, going places in all likelihood less artlessly beautiful than the delicately post-Bohemian playground she has created for herself; she hopes they're fuller, though. The polished wooden floorboards creak under her boots and then her bare feet, and she sheds articles of clothing with abandon, uninterested in any neighbors' prying eyes, uninterested in acknowledging the world outside even as she quietly misses it. It lets her avoid thinking, sometimes, and in return she gives it of her than she really should, but there is so much on either side.
Her hair swings loose over her bare back as she unties it, padding into the bathroom. The claw-footed tub will fill quickly, and in the meantime she is left with no more tasks, no more distractions, no more proxies via which she is more comfortable being vulnerable. She could turn on a movie from an era that makes her bones ache with nostalgia and over-identify with Grace Kelly, or she could pour herself into the screen of her computer until she falls asleep there, but she doesn't do either of those. Hasibe stays in front of the mirror, taking off her make-up, de-armoring piece by piece, until the fading yellow of her bruises is stark against olive skin. The lighting highlights the places Cameron hit her - once on the cheek, into the side of his desk, which formed the corresponding bruise by her temple - and she memorizes the colors like they're paintings rather than contusions.
She thinks of when she met Cameron, the brutal, efficient materialism she should have recognized at seventeen, how he said, I'll take care of it; just pay me back when you're old enough. Old enough to fuck on film, if she won't do him for free. One way or another, everyone pays their own price, and 'old enough' just means 'nobody asks too many questions, or at least not the right ones.' She thinks about getting a drink, but doesn't move, barely even looking at her own reflection any more, bored of same thing she uses to enthrall strangers. In a way, at least the injuries are new, and sometimes she thinks about scarring her face to make it something more interesting than beautiful.
She thinks of the old man whose name she never knew, the smudges on his glasses and the whiteness of his knuckles when he'd watch her walk. He said, you should have them, nobody's ever going to wear them again otherwise, it should be you, and she was both awed by how pathetic and how brilliantly sincere his loneliness was, how visceral the cultural reaction to open weakness is, how sad it is she had to fight her trained impulse to be disgusted. She doesn't wear the bracelets, either, but now she thinks, impulsively, that she should: to the corner store, to pick up the mail, when she goes to Cameron to feel him tighten the leash. She is paid in this- in their fascination. She never stopped feeding off the hearts of strangers, but this time, she can pretend it's good. It's balanced, and isn't that what she said she wanted?
She thinks, then, of Henry (as she often does, these days, while their connection ties them tighter every time they look at each other), how the dark lines of what he hides grow darker still when she appears, like he is a road map to everything she wants for good and for ill, with his arms at her back and her chin at his shoulder, his words promising after this week, I'll try, and she thinks of every other promise every other person has made her, wondering why she believes him this time. Maybe the timing was right, and she met him in a weak moment for the both of them. Maybe she was just sick of being cynical. Maybe she really did just know him before she even met him.
It doesn't really matter; she still believes.
She closes her eyes when she sinks into the bathwater, submerged, still, deep enough to drown, and a voice says somewhere by the ceiling light - sometimes this happens, but by what unfamiliar command, she can't say, since she stopped believing in God: you have no idea how far down you're going to go, my girl.
Whose voice, whose promise, whose girl is she, anyway; she doesn't ask. She doesn't even move. She just lets herself sink until it's time to swim.