A submission for my creative writing course in 2018

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Why did she continue to spend her lonely Tuesday nights here? Her "friends" didn't really enjoy her company, they merely tolerated it, and honestly, isn't that a harsher slap in the face than just being ignored totally? So, as usual, she'd excuse herself to the smokers room when she didn't really want a cigarette, but it was a good excuse to get away from them for a moment.

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Thin tendrils of smoke slid down her throat and wrapped themselves around her alveoli like skeletal hands popping bubble wrap. She stared at her own hands, trying to make sense of the lines that were there, not that those lines had done her any favours. Her future had turned out rather more bleak than what had been predicted by those lines as a girl.

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She returned and the party had left without her, of course. But no matter, she easily made friends with strangers, preferred them in fact. Each new face was a new opportunity to be someone different, someone charming, interesting, faultless. And then, when the bottles ran dry they could forget each other. That's how she liked it, these temporary relationships.

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Single malt liquor made her tongue wag in glorious round-about ways, spouting million-mile-a-minute words that fell on drunk ears that would hear everything and nothing.

Fine, if no one would hear her she would resolve to silently argue with herself. She told herself that nobody wanted to listen to her whiskey laden words and that nobody wants to kiss her grey lips because they flap too fast and obnoxiously. And that no one likes a mouth so big that they can see inside their alcohol filled stomach like some boozy, self-hating grouper.

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There's no hope now, so she'll pick some similarly self-hating kindred to share her sheets for the night. Her usual last ditch effort to fill the holes that gape within her. But self sabotage is an artform don't you know? And a hard-learnt one at that.