The silvery, unforgiving blades sliced through the soft locks of pale blonde hair without mercy, a thousand strands cut and falling like chains broken to gather on the cold, yellowed tile of the bathroom floor, scuffed from years of tired feet and littered with the scattered remains of a life left behind; a stray earring, sparkling, fleeting like a star that she'd wished on once before it faded into the dark.

She cut her hair because it was what he loved most about her. He used to run his calloused hands through it, his touch gentle, fingers tangling in it ever so slightly yet with strength as if reminding her that there was no escape from him. They were the same hands that threw the lamp still shattered on the bedroom floor like dreams, beautiful and broken, ceramic pieces reflecting like mirrors, showing a lying smile hiding eyes that longed to cry. I am fine, she whispered, that smile as fragile as the fluttering wings of a butterfly which at any moment could cease their rhythmic movement, as her heart could its frantic, painful beating.

Crumpled on the floor like flower petals folding inward for protection, she let her weary grey eyes flutter closed, her slender fingers running across the threadbare rug as if in its fabric depths there lay an answer to her suffering.

Her eyes were grey for sorrow, he once said. For an inner mourning that her heart seemed strangled with, like tiny thorns twisting and piercing, constricting until she was in a cage of constant misery. But she said they were grey for the wings of a dove on which she so longed to fly away.

Her touch fell upon the silken threads that she'd hastily hacked away, as if removing them could remove all of the agony, as if it could undo her past and let her be born again. They were cold as the floor upon which they lay, and the hands that were now holding them, lifting them, only to let them flutter back to the ground in a cascade that she imagined was every fragment of her heart.
I am fine, she said as she lifted her head, suddenly weightless without the length that had once held it down, shrouded it, kept her safe and warm and yet stifled, suffocating, drowning in what she could not control. It was gone; he was gone.
She was finally free.