Sadly she moves

 

There is no such person as the woman before me. 

Oh, she has height and girth, hair, and a face with two terrified eyes and one trembling or grimacing smile, but she does not really exist.

She is the sum total of other people's opinions. Her best friend's inner most thoughts shape her wants and needs. Her mother is the god who lives in her head and says what is always right in this world, whether it is something owned, done, thought, or dreamed. Nobody's opinion carried more weight than that memory of a woman she called, Mom, whether it was true or existed or not.

She walks through her world playing the part of a thousand mid century love stories where women are fragile and beautiful, loved and nurtured and always get their man in the happily ever after. Only there is no happily ever after for her. There is not even a happy present for her.

Her world is a jumbled confusion of jumping to the right cues and expecting some reward to be tossed into her mouth if she does it quickly enough. No thinking needed. No thinking allowed. She walks a tightrope of not knowing. Not wanting to know, because that would mean thinking on her own and expressing an opinion.

She is fiercely protective of her non being. Proud of it in a sort of stubborn way that put to any other use might have taken her in a much different direction. Words flow out of her mouth contradicting each other sentence by sentence, but she neither notices, nor cares. Confronted, she only becomes louder and more emphatic, but it does not change the fact that she really isn't listening at all.

Life in motion is the rule.

Movement is her salvation. In constant motion, she vacuums, mows, shops, walks, exercises -- anything to avoid thinking or participating in real life, her own, or others'. All creatures suffer at her hand. She has no discipline to offer, nothing to teach, leaving any dependent creature completely at sea in a world that eats those, who don't know the rules, alive. But she sees their suffering as her blessed mission in life.

By creating these creatures who have no notion of how to function, she creates a place for herself; swooping in to do good and loving deeds that keep them chained to her forever.