I look at the girl standing in the mirror before me. This isn’t Isabelle Lang. This is a girl who’s gone through too much. This is a girl who’s let the darkness of society take over her body. She’s let herself go.

She’s deprived herself of life. No food, no water. She’s locked herself in her large room in her flat she shared with friends. The girl in the mirror has scars everywhere. Ribs poking through her mid section. She was a human skeleton with only a thin layer of flesh laying over her brittle bones. She let the person, who’d been there for her for several years, go. He’d left her alone. So, here she stood, like a parasite off of her friends. Feeding off of them.

Though she’d only lived here for 2 weeks, she’d only come out of her room twice. Only for a jug of water. This girl didn’t deserve simple luxuries. This girl’s friends tried to lure her out of the room. It hadn’t ever worked. Yet one sang her lullabies to quiet her crying at night. To help chase the nightmares away. The nightmares of solitude and death.

This wasn’t the old Isabelle, but the new one.

I stood there for a while, taking it all in. Large sweatpants and an old t-shirt of my old favorite band hung off of my body like curtains in front of a wide window. I lifted the shirt to show my sides. Those too had scars running parallel to my hips. Or, what was left of them other than bones. I took one more glance at them, and the tears flooded over like a waterfall. I stared at myself as I sunk down the ground, curling up in a ball. I screamed, crying hard.

What had I become? I’d become a ghost of myself. I relied on that boy so much. He’d gone away, leaving me alone in life. No parents, no siblings left. I only had the people I called my friends.

I sat there for what felt like hours. I’d finally broken.

Soon, the one girl Rose came running into my room like a thunderstorm. She instantly scooped me up in her arms and held me tight in her embrace. She rocked me back and forth like baby. Words wormed their way into my ears, calming me gradually.


I found God, on the corner of First and Amastad...


The first words to my favorite song slowed the tears and screaming to low moans and soundless tears. They fell down onto my shirt, each fear and scar going with them.


You found me, you found me, lying on the floor....


She continued on, each note taking away another worry away with the soft melody. When the song ended, she pulled up my shirt, again revealing the scars on my side. She looked at me in dismay.

“You’re not the girl I used to know,” she said quietly. Not in disgust, or distaste. She was simply stating a fact.

And all I replied was, “I know,”

The tears continued to fall down my face, no matter how hard I tried to stop them. They just kept coming.

It was as if something inside of me finally broke. I had kept these emotions bottled up, and now that bottle had overflowed and everything came rushing out in a flood of emotions.

I knew Rose was right. I wasn’t the same. Never would be, never could.

Things happen in life, that change us. That make us new people. Make us things that old friends don’t recognize, or acknowledge any longer. These things in life make us who we are. They say when you reach a certain age, these things stop happening. But they don’t. They never stop. You’re never the same person you were when your mom cuddled with you when you had a nightmare at night. Because that child grows up into a twisted society that changes them. Makes them realize that those nightmares that kept you up at night when you were five become reality. And they become reality very fast.

This girl here, crying on the floor, isn’t the same child she was when she left home. She’d come to college, looking for a life. For love. This helpless girl is heartbroken.

This girl in the mirror, crying on the dirty floor, isn't the girl everyone knows. This is the girl on the inside.