“Oh, you finished drawing, Ash? …Ash?”
“Huh? Oh, uh, hi, Lila. Yeah, uh, yeah, just about.” Ashwyn didn’t draw very often, but when she did, she devoted her whole focus towards it - to the point that she would even miss her sister’s simple questions.
“Who’s that you drew, then?”
“It’s, uh.” Ashwyn felt her cheeks heat up a little, which was rare in and of itself. “It’s me. Or, at least,” she continued, her words getting faster and tripping over each other, “it’s sort of like a, um, an idealized…? No, that’s not the word, I mean, it’s how…” She fell quiet for a moment, looking away from her sister, almost ashamed to say it. “It’s how I want to look.”
Lila didn’t answer immediately; instead, she just placed a hand on her younger sister’s shoulder.
Here it comes, Ashwyn thought. She knew the drawing wasn’t great, that the person in it was unrealistic. She knew she’d never have the drawing’s build nor her figure. But… she still dreamed, and hoped, and prayed to Alagi (the deity of such things), that one day she’d wake up and find a different Ashwyn in the mirror - one that didn’t look like, well, her old self play-acting. It helped, sometimes, to draw, or to throw herself into her work, or even just clean around the house - anything to distract her from that dark voice in the back of her head, the one that undercut her at every opportunity, the one that told her she’d never be good enough.
“None of us meet our ideal, Ash,” Lila said, choosing her words carefully. “We have to make do with what we’ve got. If we don’t, what else do we have?”
Right on schedule, the voice in the back of Ashwyn’s head chimed in. Easy for her to say, it said, she was dealt a winning hand from the start. Ashwyn shushed it. She knew Lila only meant the best.
But that didn’t stop it from aching, somehow.