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It wasn't so much that it was pink, because it was also green and half of it wasn't there at all. It curled, nay it furled about her ears, against her cheek bones and gave her a decidedly punk look, but if you knew the girl, if you dared to peak beyond the volumes of tattoos, the layers of make-up and the almost-but-not-quite too baggy, too revealing clothes... if you really knew her, you'd never use the word punk to describer her, in fact anything would be closer to the truth than that.
Pink hair didn't define a girl, but it could certainly frame her, and frame this one it did. It wasn't her hair so much as her cleavage that kept the onlooker from her eyes. Low-cut shirts worn like chainmail in a battle for the upper hand. If the eyes strayed down even just that initial moment, it was enough time for her to mask the fear and replace it with an inviting grin -- a seductive stare -- a mere slip of an expression that said she might not know exactly what you wanted, but whatever it was, she was more than willing to provide it, you just had to say the word. True or not, this look was more disarming than the most innocent child's face could be. It didn't stem from a place of self-assuredness, she was in point of fact shy. She was so bitingly shy that her insides knotted, her stomach muscles clenched, if she thought anyone had even a hint of a notion that she was as shy as she was -- she worked over-time to conceal what she saw as her deficiency. It was more than that -- to her it was a defect -- an affront to the strong, independent, intelligent, capable woman she strove to be. Strength was only viable in out-going individuals, any thing else was failure - fear was a means to an ending she didn't seek.
And seek she did. Some days her dreams were so large and far reaching that one human brain was much too small to contain them -- she had to share them, tell them, write them, sing and chant them to all who crossed her path. Other days her dreams were so small and humble that they felt entirely within her grasp -- so very close she thought she could smell them, just over the next rise in the road. But how could those pass as dreams? Dreams were supposed to be larger than life, epic even. How could a simple desire to be happy and not alone constitute something as meaningful as a dream?
Sometimes the way she over-compensated for her shyness was bordering on obnoxious -- and bordering in a way that was edging between obnoxious and obscenely obnoxious. She couldn't quite reel herself back in once it had tipped into those realms, though. It was like a locomotive that only went in one direction and had no breaks -- one just had to sit back and let it burn off its own steam, before it came to a stop -- even if that meant biting one's tongue in the face of an imminent wreck. Just how many such wrecks she had been through in her three decades of life wasn't really the sort of thing she kept track of. She just picked herself up on the other side and said a resounding "Whatever." In this case, synonymous to "next!" Resiliency was what her multitudes of therapists would call it. Survival was what she saw it as -- the vaguest notion of it, at least. She had been surviving her own existence from one bad decision to the next, intent on living to the fullest, even if it killed her.
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