Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

This is the great horror of life: that mistakes are forever, and cannot be undone. You can never truly go back, even if you want to retrace your steps and take another route. The path has already disappeared behind you.

People don’t take the time to really look at each other anymore. We live in a world of surface imagery, skimming past each other, registering just enough to assign a category and label before moving on to the next shiny thing.

I’ve spent my whole life looking out, trying to locate the architects who constructed the walls of this world that I found myself in. I used to blame the Lieblings: It was easy to hate them for everything they had that I did not, and for the way they shut me out of their world. As if one door that closed in my face was the reason that everything else went sideways. But I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that now. I could blame my mother, for dragging me along in her bad decisions; for failing to give me the leg up in life that I longed for. I could blame her, too, for failing to take care of herself, so that I had to do it for her. I could blame Lachlan, for seducing me into joining his schemes and for turning on me when I became inconvenient to him. I could blame society, I could blame the government, I could blame capitalism gone awry—I could tug on the threads of social inequality and watch them unravel all the way back to the beginning and pin my blame on whatever I find there. And surely all these elements were pieces of the reason why I am where I am. But wherever I look to lay my blame, I always discover the same person: myself. I am the common denominator. There is no one path in life that is set before you, I’m starting to realize; no one is making your decisions for you. Instead of looking out at the world to find a cause, it’s time for me to start looking inward.