1Disclaimer: I own this in its absolute entirety.
Mai.
I want to name her Demon, to categorize her as one of the under-earth dwellings of Hell. However, every time I try to refer to her as such a beast, I find myself immobilized, unable to enunciate the final syllable.
"Mai," she hisses, claws for hands instantly going to my throat. "Mai."
I know the meaning behind her peculiar name, the way every letter shapes and leans towards the beginnings of my soul, trying to manifest themselves into five letters as opposed to three. The ink treachery of the English language seeps into my skin, branding me, as Mai's coy and pointy smile shines in the hallowed moonlight, cracked and fractured.
She was birthed of the anger and hatred that seeps through a teenage boy's soul when he realizes every bedtime story he was told as a toddler held no true meaning. She was born into the world the acid, the kind that aches within a woman's lungs, when she felt the air was too thin when she tried to inhale, caught in terror and drunken spinning. She was raised within screams of a lover, stumbling into her shower, sobbing, knowing that only the rush of water would deafen her cries and drown her broken heart and it's restless confides within her chest. She was loved by the swift and merciless gaze of fate, the abruptness of death, and the smiling mouths of liars.
She embodied and lived everything I hated.
Mai is my shield.
Mai is the twisted part of myself that I've kept hidden for so long. Mai is every sin I've committed, every curse I've uttered, every lie I've told, every denial I've forced down her throat. Mai is the imperfect me that I swore I'd never be, the changed part of me that I threw against the wall and battered until she was black and blue. Mai is the disease on my skin, the unevenness of my eyes, the hatred of the body I'm forced to reside in. Mai is the anger, the hatred, and disappointment; the unloving, putrid, ugly thing that I've tried so hard not to embody but have failed to completely smother within me.
Mai is body behind the forced smiles and kind words that are meant for nothing but selfish gain. She has forced who I thought I was out control, and truly now do I realize that Mai is me, and I am Mai. I have become in a single most thing I hated.
Myself.