cat leto. 2.

[✨ zozo.]

and by daylight,
see the tangles
and knots of my riverine hair.

i am the bad daughter,
the freedom fighter,
the shaper of death masks.

blame me.

- barbara-jane reyes

[✨ zozo.]

I know I lack pride. Drive. Vision. That perhaps this surname, this legacy, is wasted on me. But I don't mind it at all.

Call it middle-child syndrome, I guess. Us Leto's always come in threes. Whereas my cousin Calypso wanted to be something, everything, I decided I would be okay simply existing. That ambition could skip a generation in me, that a cozy childhood free of drama was nice - but lacking.

I can never quite put my finger on it, like trying to remember a dream that slips from your mind as you wake. I got my wisdom teeth taken out at fourteen, an aching jaw that could not clench - and I wept when I woke up, another piece of me taken - so on my seventeenth birthday I got them tattooed behind my ears, filling one of many voids. When I was younger I thought perhaps I was adopted, but my mother laughed and told me to look in the mirror and then look at our family tree.

She was right. I am one of them, centered perfectly between Mom and Dad, an older and younger sibling. So I kept drifting, content with being painfully average at home and always looking out of the window instead of ahead at the classroom blackboard. Preferring to watch Exy games rather than compete. Letting myself round and soften, curvy like our mother - so far from the jagged edges that the Leto name brings.

But I think the worst sin of all is that as much as I try to, I simply do not care. Caring has all but destroyed my little brother from the inside-out, how removed from our lives my older has become. And I don't plan on following in their footsteps - I see how viscous it makes Teagan. How distant it has made DD.

I'd rather be nothing than a martyr. An outcast.

So I'll drift, and never apologise for it. In-between girl, indecisive, perfectly unbothered, floating all the way to Four and back again.

table by elegant // gfx by me.

[✨ zozo.]

cb from beating the odds

umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars] eulalie blake 1a 🍒 tris

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

*the sound of a brisk inhale, followed by a shrill scream*