Tea Stain

                      TEA STAIN

  At this moment, she couldn't quite decide which was more painful: the constant struggle to live up to everybody's expectations or the sudden, bitter realization that no one expected anything from her anymore.

  Exhaling a shuddering breath, she brought the over steeped cup of tea to her forehead in hope that its comforting warmth would take her mind of the growing pressure constricting her throat. Surely she had done enough snivelling about these past months to last her a life time. No such luck though. Already the tears that had been blurring her visions for a few minutes were spilling over her cheeks and clinging to her lashes, turning unpleasantly cold almost immediately. The delicate drops slid slowly down her skin, following some hidden pre-defined track and briefly gathering at the corner of an anguished frown, before ending their trek on the oilcloth covering the kitchen table, in an intricate starry pattern.

  Sadly this minute detail was the only thing even remotely graceful about her crying. She was aware that she wasn't a pretty crier. Not the kind that would inspire a romantic, wistful painting –unless the author was aiming at a study in red and snotty. She had a chubby face, a little too chubby to be excused by her obvious youth, and it had the unfortunate consequence of making her chin appear weaker than it really was when it was quivering to contain her sobbing. With pursed lips that appeared positively lost in the middle of her big round mug, and her lowered head bringing out truly unbecoming folds where her jaw line should have been, she looked about seven years old when she really was eighteen. She didn't to look in a mirror to know that she was probably red in the face and that her eyes were steadily going the same way.

  It had bothered her at first. When these frequent bouts of uncontrolled weeping had still been new and alarming, she'd had the poor judgement of stealing a glance at her reflection before she could erase the evidence of her distress at the washbasin. That was not a face a boy would be happy to wipe clean with a tender thumb or to kiss better in hope of giving it a smile. On top of being so pathetic that it was almost ridiculous, she was one ugly bitch. Despite all her efforts to adhere to the politically correct motto affirming that inner beauty was all that mattered and that she shouldn't resent what she couldn't help, deep inside she really fucking resented that she wasn't pretty. That she wasn't one of those small, dainty things whose sorrow inspired awe and pity all at the same time –as opposed to pity and disgust, as she feared her affliction would. That particular piece of introspection had made her feel weak, an insult to women and feminists everywhere, and coincidentally even more angry and disgusted with herself than she had already been.

  Of course she knew as soon as she thought the infuriating notions that she was being irrational and, above all things, depressingly common. Why, you could just take her picture to illustrate "Teenage Angst" in any dictionary, couldn't you? Of that she was very aware. Of course she was, and painfully so. That's what made the sting of self-loathing all the worse. She knew she didn't deserve half of it, that it was as unnecessary as it was harmful, which in turn made her hate herself all the more fiercely. Precisely because she ought to know better. It was a wall banger, a headdesk-worthy paradox that she had spent numerous hours analyzing. Clearly, she had to have some kind of mental problem to think so little and so much of herself at the same bloody time.

  'Yeah, the kind of mental problem that makes you think about yourself in the third person, you gigantic twit', her present self chided without much conviction, noting absently that she was waxing lyrical again. A more prominent part of her mind was still focused on the matter at hand, namely crying less and less silently by the minute. She couldn't help herself. This didn't have anything to do with her physical insecurities either. No, that train of thought had just been an inappropriate and perfectly unhelpful distraction supplied by her ever generous rational mind. In fact she would have been hard-pressed to explain to anyone, even to herself, what was so dreadful about a harsh remark and a short-lived spat that it should warrant such an extreme reaction. It just did. Every damn time.

  She buried her head in her drawn up knees and started whimpering as softly as she could. Which, really, wasn't that softly at all. By that time her shoulders were racked with violent soft that left her breathless and feeling as though she was drowning. 'This is getting ridiculous, deadpanned the nagging little voice in a corner of her mind. No it's not. No it's not. The rest of her person seemed to scream back. Drowning. She'd had that impression quite often lately. The feeling –however false it may be- had become familiar enough that she could make out the warning signs with enough time to spare to nip it in the bud. Most of the time at least. From time to time, she would feel a cold shiver possessing her entire body, compelling her to close her eyes, making her shoulders shoot up toward her ears. Suddenly she would just need to make a conscious effort to breathe. Ideas would act up, pressing gently but insistently at the edge of her mind. She knew then that she would have to be quick. Quick to find some mindless activity to occupy her brain. Preferably something involving fiction of some kind. Yes, imaginary people to get her involved with their imaginary problems.

  But inevitably there would be a lull in the steady stream of drivel on which she fed. One thought was enough. One stray thought seeping insidiously in the watertight container she was trying to turn her mind into. 'It's almost the holidays already. Well it would be if I was actually doing anything productive with my life.' 'Am I seriously putting off playing videogames as if it was a valid occupation to begin with? How very sad.' Harmless enough. The kind of things she could joke about when she was with people. But the problem was that she wasn't with people very often. Or even worse, said people, with just a misplaced word, could send her off on a dark path more surely than any nasty self-abusing thought she could muster on her own. Feelings of inadequacy, guilt, regret for things that hadn't or wouldn't happen, would just come forth all at once like a mighty wave and burst through the dam of her mind.

  There was precious little she could do from that point, except wait. For the tears to come and wash most of the unbearable pain away, for the litany of thoughts ensnaring her senses to unfold to the end or until she found herself unable to go through with it, for the blind, irrational panic which afflicted her in those dreaded moments to recede enough for her to feel numb and hopeless. It was a lot like drowning indeed, that merciless helplessness as she went down and down and down. Unable to do anything. Unable to ask for help from under all that water. Surely nobody would have understood even if she'd been able to talk, stranded as they were in completely different elements. She didn't even understand it herself! What was so horrid about her life that could make her feel like she was going to die for no reason whatsoever? It made her feel angry and ashamed. It was ludicrous. It was indecent. She wasn't entitled to feel this way. She didn't have any real problem. People who had lost loved ones, who were sick, hungry, belittled, alone and hurting: those were the people with the problems. She had a family that loved her, she was in good health, she had a roof over her head and all in all she was living a very, very comfortable life.

  But she felt so very alone. Hopeless. Utterly beyond help. Of course that could be because she hadn't been able to establish a proper friendship with anyone in years and, now that she had buggered everything up, she had all the time in the world to mull over her loneliness and it really hurt. However, she suspected that it was deeper than that. That the terrible thing hanging over her head in icy silence was precisely the reason why she felt so cut off from everyone else. Whenever she found herself in one of her "states", she was hit by the certitude that none of it mattered. The thing was letting her know in hissing whispers that nothing she could do or say could change anything to the cold, hard, unrelenting fact that she would never find her place here and that she would never become anything even remotely close to the person she felt she ought to be. And as much as she liked to play Woe-is-me and to dump the blame on the world around her, she knew, she just knew that it was her own damn fault for being born such an odd sort, expecting way too much from herself and from others, wanting so much to live that the bland reality of every moment just plain repulsed her.

  How did they do it? How did people live? How could they bear their own mind? How could they not be crushed by the enormity of everything? How could they go to work, shop for things, talk about nonsense all the time? How does it come to that? How can they settle for all that…crap?! How do they bear the excruciating knowledge that there is no solving life? No winning? That you have to work through the moment, and the next, and the next, and the one after that?

  She went straight from her state of existential panic to a relieving shade of numb.

  No no no no no no no no. No good thinking about that. No point. No purpose.

  The debt of that vertiginous spiral of potentially life-threatening ideas scared her out of her mind.

  Shifting in her seat, she tried to resume sipping her cold tea but a vestigial hiccup almost made her choke on it. She told herself, not for the first time, that she was very very far from being the first person to go through that particular brand of metaphysical angst, as evidenced by millennia of philosophy, literature and teenagers being silly self-centred bastards.
'You're an arrogant twat and you've just about lost the plot, you know that?'
She knew that. Considering her tea with a look of distaste on her chubby tear-strained face, she went to empty the half-full mug into the sink.

  The whole thing had started with an argument about tea.