Blue Funk

The beginning of yet another incomplete short story. But this one might actually go somewhere, even if it's not very far. Who knows? Input is good.
Here we have a girl, finding out that being shallow is rather unfulfilling, and going on some wacked quest to find the meaning of life. Maybe I'll make her a serial killer. Or maybe I'll have her find dragons and...stuff. *shrug* We'll see.


Finding life interesting is sometimes a fantastically difficult thing to do—but finding oneself interesting is often immeasurably harder. At least, that was Sharon’s opinion. And, she thought, the second is probably, in most cases, the cause of the first.
If asked by a friend, Sharon would claim to find herself inordinately interesting, and might even pretend to be offended. If asked by a stranger, she might have been slightly more honest. Sharon was very normal, though she most likely didn’t realize it, in that respect. People are commonly more honest with strangers than they are even with themselves.
Truthfully, Sharon found herself incredibly dull, from her name right down to her pampered, painted toenails. Thus the striving to stand out, the façade of arrogance, and the infrequent theatrical pleas for help.
Sharon’s most pressing problem was that she didn’t know what she wanted. Be different, or normal? Dark, mysterious, morose? Light-hearted, easy-going, open? She settled the matter by diagnosing herself as bipolar, and self-medicated with a variety of both over the counter and illegal drugs. She made no effort to control herself in any way, and so threw everything she had into each moment. It shouldn't have surprised her, then, when one morning, she woke up feeling nothing.
She’d burnt herself out.
The day seemed normal at first. She’d woken up very late, even for her; noon had come and gone fifteen minutes past. Groggy and irritable, she sat up and ran careless slender fingers through her uneven hair—to which she had taken her scissors but the night before, producing an extremely chopped, yet somehow appealing, hairstyle.
Yawning and stretching, she climbed out of bed. Where to begin? She took some time deciding on what to wear—the comfortable, discarded for the clean, to be peeled off moments later in favor of the fashionable.
As anorexia was her current self-inflicted illness, she avoided the kitchen altogether, reaching for her cigarettes instead. In her familiar morning ritual, she told herself that she would quit tomorrow, and proceeded to smoke three cigarettes in quick succession, while checking her various online accounts.
Upon finding no new messages, she came to the conclusion that all of her friends had either died, or were no longer talking to her. To calm herself, she hastily typed a sloppy suicide note and posted it on no less than five different sites.
“That will show them,” smugness. “And if no one responds, I’ll know that I should just go through with it,” sigh.
But Sharon still felt vaguely unsatisfied—in fact, perhaps she just felt vague in general, being a world-class fence-sitter of the worst sort. In any case, she stared out the window with a small frown of concentration, as she unconsciously strove to ignore the tiny, desperate whisper in the back of her mind: “There must be more to life than this…”

X X X

“I’m fine,” Sharon told her friends, trying her best to tell an obvious lie, but no one seemed to notice.
“I’m going insane,” she told her councilor, who spent a large amount of time spouting nonsense, and charging enough money that it must have come straight from god.
“I have sinned,” she told a priest—though she wasn’t religious in the least, confessing is such a grand gesture.
“I hate you!” she screamed at her mother.
“I need you,” she cried to her ex boyfriend.
“I miss you,” she prayed to god.
None of which did any good.