Sugar

by Mia Ballard

T he plan to kill Dean unfurled in my mind like a dark bloom in the midst of an otherwise idle Tuesday evening, the kind where the air tastes like spent fuel and the sky bleeds orange, stubbornly holding onto the last dregs of daylight.

oh so we’re starting like that huh

And so, the plan to kill Dean was born not of vengeance, but of survival. It was the primal scream in the face of an existential crisis, the decision to cut off the tumor that threatened to consume me from the inside out.

I catch my reflection in the streaked mirror, my face flushed as if I've been slapped by the discovery. It's strange how anger morphs my features, twisting them into an unfamiliar landscape.

I open my eyes, and the mirror isn't just a reflection anymore—it's a portal to something vaster and forgiving. In this moment, I am no longer contained. The silver faucets stretch and morph into liquid metal vines, spiraling upward into infinity. The walls melt away, leaving me suspended in a universe punctuated by distant stars and vivid streams of light. Anger is a distant echo now, swallowed by the boundless tapestry unfolding before me. I am free.

The meticulous nature of my planning was not born of malice but of necessity. It was a declaration of independence, a refusal to be the victim in a narrative where I had always seen myself as the heroine. The plan was my salvation, my catharsis, a way to sever the rot before it consumed me whole. Killing Dean, in theory, was not about ending his life; it was about reclaiming mine. It was about staring into the abyss of my own despair and choosing, instead, to rewrite the ending.

My transformation wasn't for love; it was a sacrifice on the altar of compromise, a slow, insidious erasure of my identity. The realization of his infidelity is a perverse liberation, a permission slip signed in betrayal that frees me from the self-imposed shackles. I no longer feel the need to dim my own light to match his dull glow.