POETRY – ANNABELLE SERIES

---

you wanted the fantasy—now meet the fallout

The light doesn’t flatter her.

It splits her down the middle—green on one cheek, red on the other.
Like a warning. Like a dare.
She doesn’t turn from it. She lets it expose her angles. Her sharpness. Her refusal to soften for their comfort.

This is not a glow.
This is a glare.

She watches the room through tinted lenses, as if the distance they create might protect her. As if dimming the world might dim what still pulses inside her.
The ache. The want. The memory.

The drink in her hand is untouched. It’s a prop. Like everything else she wears tonight.
The sunglasses.
The chains.
The silence.

They look at her like she’s a story they want to be part of.

They don’t know she’s the ending.

---

She doesn’t speak much anymore—not in places like this.
Words feel expensive. Trust, impossible.

So she listens instead. To the way people try to impress through noise. To the bass that thumps like a hollow heart.
To the click of her own restraint every time someone gets too close.

She lets the glasses do the talking. Lets the braids fall like armor.
Lets them wonder what she’s thinking.

Because curiosity is safer than closeness.
Let them project. Let them guess.

It’s easier than being held wrong.

They don’t know Jimmy.
They don’t know the weight she carries in her wrist—his watch ticking, ticking, never letting her forget that she is still here and he is not.
That time moved on. That she did too. But not without cost.

After Jimmy died, she lost herself.
She became something else.
Someone she wasn’t proud of.
Someone she didn’t know.

That’s what no one sees when they look at her.
Not the reinvention.
Not the ruins beneath it.
Not the choice to survive when survival meant shapeshifting.

They don’t know how she nearly drowned in grief and came back with a mirror for a heart.
Reflective. Untouchable. Sharp.

But there was a moment, days ago—brief and disarming—when she stared at an old photo of him.
And in the quiet weight of his gaze, something shifted.

She felt something familiar when she looked at his picture.
Something that reminded her she had power.

Not the performative kind. Not applause.
But the power to stand. To remember. To continue.

---

Someone approaches. Of course they do.
Men like him always do—when the lights are low and the mystery is wrapped in gloss.

“You look like trouble,” he says, leaning in with a confidence he hasn’t earned.

She tilts her head, slow. Deliberate.
Her thumb brushes Jimmy’s lighter inside her sleeve.
Click. No flame. Just memory.

She studies him the way wolves study fences.

“I am,” she says. “But not the kind you’re good at surviving.”

He laughs—too loud, too fake—but steps back.
She doesn’t flinch. She never does.

Because she’s not here to be wanted.
She’s here to remember who she is without being touched.

She’s here to prove she can be in the world again—even if the world doesn’t deserve her.

---

But even now, beneath the rhythm and neon and the low hum of everything she refuses to feel—

Something stirs.

A voice not extinguished.
A hunger not silenced.

That same voice that whispered in the stillness after Jimmy left her:

Will anyone ever see the girl beneath the glass?
Will anyone reach without pulling?
Will anyone stay if she stops performing?

And for the briefest breath, she considers it—what it might feel like to answer those questions with action.
To peel the gloss. To set down the mask.
To let someone see her without preparation.

But not tonight.

Tonight is for the performance.
Tonight is for control.
Tonight is armor masquerading as elegance.

She lifts her glass—not to drink, but to steady her hand.
And in the mirrored wall, she catches a glimpse.

Not the reflection.
Not the projection.

Annabelle.

Not a ghost. Not a brand.
Not a wound in makeup.

Just a woman.

Too sharp to hold.
Too real to forget.