She felt the eggshells crush underneath her feet as she walked. She tried so hard to dance around them, but the heels she was wearing made it almost impossible. She would feel the delicateness of each and every shell smash like fiberglass underneath the soles of her feet as she attempted, with all the strength she had, to walk near him.
It hurt to say out loud, even to admit it to herself, but she was pretty damn sure he had never heard her real voice. Its true tone. You know - her REAL voice. That thing that courageous breaks through and emerges when you can finally be yourself with someone. And I mean your actual fucking self and not some filtered, censored, watered down version of who the world seems to want you to be. Certainly not the version of herself that "they" knew. And not that thing where she put on that fake goddamn voice for people. You know the one, we all probably do it. More often than she would care to admit, she'd catch herself doing it and wouldn't recognize her own voice. No matter how ridiculous the dance was, she couldn't understand why she had to act like anybody but herself about them.
It's not like she wasn't being herself around him or was disingenuous, it's just that she couldn't really breathe. Not completely, anyway. Every attempt at breathing was shallow, labored, alien. She couldn't speak, either. She simply couldn't inhale the amount of air one needs to breathe into their lungs in order to exhale one's true, authentic voice.
It was always imprecise, almost, at times, fallacious. Masked an octave off. Or wavering cadence. Or misinterpreted verbiage. Or, better yet, silence.
She didn't know which version of her he thought he knew. All she knew is that a few people knew the real parts of her, once. She had given away so many pieces of herself, but no one had ever known all of her. And fuck, that was all she wanted. And, as the shells crushed under foot, she knew, it was something she would never have.
