The Woman.

Unfinished story about identity and living authentically. Covers topics relating to mental health, clarity, and self-discovery.

Prologue

Victoria De Feu D’etoiles was the kind of woman people described as intense, but pretty. Which was a polite way of saying she made them feel uncomfortably observed, but was attractive enough for people to ignore that discomfort, to a degree. She listened the way engineers listen: tracking inconsistencies, mapping emotional stress points, noticing when people spoke one way and moved another way entirely. 

She had always been too bright in a way that resisted boxes and packaging. Too analytical for mysticism. Too intuitive for pure logical rationale. She read theory for pleasure and art for instruction. She could hold four conflicting interpretations of a situation in her head without expecting or demanding resolution. All this made her useful �" and exhausting �" to be around. 

So she learned to sand herself down. Not all at once. Not even consciously. Just enough to make life survivable. 

She cultivated politeness like a second language. Learned which questions made people feel defensive and which made them feel brilliant. Learned to soften conclusions into suggestions, truth into humor. She let other people arrive organically at ideas she had already mapped, and she pretended not to notice. 

It worked. 

People liked her. People trusted her. Came to her with problems. She was dependable, incisive, and most importantly to them, non-threatening. Her insight was wrapped in empathy. Her intensity was redirected into caretaking and emotional labor. 

She told herself this was maturity. When, really, it was large-scale emotional management. She had relationships that never quite fit, jobs that praised her “potential” while quietly redirecting her actual power, and conversations where she was admired but never met. She thought she was waiting for an environment that would match her internal pressure. Instead, she was actively adapting to environments that couldn’t help but suffocate it. 

Victoria had been quiet for so long that people mistook her silence for a sign of peace and tranquility. What they didnt understand was that her quiet had never been empty. It was densely populated �" by calculations, pattern recognition, and contingencies stacked three moves ahead. Silence, for Victoria, was not absence, but compression. 

They didn’t notice the heat collecting beneath her ribs, or the way her eyes tracked for faults in the air like a predator mapping thermals. Everyone mistook her stillness for rest, and her composure for consent. They assumed that because she wasn’t erupting, nothing volatile was happening. 

What no one, including herself, had ever asked was what it cost her to be this way. Not the listening, or the thinking, but the constant recalibration. The quiet, continuous labor of deciding which version of herself would be the least disruptive in a given room. She did this so reflexively that it stopped feeling like a choice and started to feel like gravity. So, in time, people forgot that wide-eyed girl, with an expression that could cut steel, and an intensity capable of melting obsidian. 

Even she forgot, for a while. 

She slept through herself like a house with the lights off �" structure intact, furniture waiting, rooms unoccupied. She said polite things in polite tones to people who liked polite women, and she dimmed her passion to something domestic and chewable.

Until �" one quiet night, crouched on her floor, phone in hand, she felt the atmosphere tilt. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t rage. It was the sudden, disorienting certainty that she had been living at the wrong temperature. The air around her tasted new �" metallic, charged, like the sky, seconds before it swallows a church steeple in lightning. 

Victoria didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. She just noticed. 

‘This is how awakenings actually happen,’ she thought. Not with trumpets and grand visions, but with the soft horror of realizing you’ve been sleeping in your own body like a tourist in a hotel room. She felt the primal part of her stretch, readjust, and sit up straight. It was hungry �" not for people, not for permission, but for recognition. 

For years, she had worn an expression built for weather she was never meant to exist in. Storm eyes in a drizzle world. Conflict belonged to her like teeth belonged to a wolf, and yet she had spent her days gnawing on leaves and saying thank you. No one had told her that she could devour. 

“No one ever tells us,” she murmured to the empty room. 

Her phone buzzed against her palm. Words flashed across the screen �" conditional concern wrapped in image management. A lesser version of her might’ve swallowed the insult and called it a virtue. This one did not. 

She read the message once. Twice, carefully. Then she laughed, sharp and bright, like a match head flaring to life. She could see the structure now: some people built entire lives and personalities out of drywall and optics. They wear their moral cleanliness like designer perfume, and mistake the absence of intensity for goodness. They believe quiet means kind, that composed means safe, and that honesty is reserved for private conversation. 

Victoria was not composed. She was not quiet. 

She was accurate. 

In that moment, she understood the architecture of herself: she was a phenomenon, not a performance. Her identity wasnt a list of traits �" it was a climate. Anyone who wanted to exist near her would need the right set of bones or the right kind of roots. No more apologizing for pressure systems. No more shrinking to fit the weather report. 

Victoria set the phone down carefully, like a weapon she no longer needed. 

Outside, wind curled around the corners of her quiet house. She walked to the window and flung it open. She let the air in, let the temperature rise and fall, and let the climate correct itself ambiguously.

Awakenings are not always polite. They are not beautiful in the ways magazines and stories prefer. They come at you with hunger, burning passion, and the realization that you were always more animal than appliance. 

Victoria smiled �" small and honest. She did not know where she was going yet, but she knew one thing with absolute certainty: she was done being furniture in her own story. She slept with the window open that night. Listening to the unpredictable sounds of nature lull her to sleep. 

The Glasshouse 

Victoria woke up already burning. 

Not the cinematic kind of rousing �" no gasp, no bolt upright �" but the slow, groggy realization that her sheets were damp, clinging to her like evidence. Sweat cooled rapidly against her skin, leaving her shivering in the afterimage of the heat. Her heart was already running, late for something she couldn't name. 

The dream hadn’t had a plot. They rarely did lately. 

It was just pressure. A ceiling lowering by increments too small to argue with. Walls made of glass that reflected versions of her she no longer inhabited �" smiling, nodding. Every time she tried to speak, condensation bloomed instead of sounds. Every time she touched the glass, it warmed, softened, and threatened to give. 

She lay completely still now, staring at the dimly lit ceiling of her room.

Author's Note

Completely unfinished. I don't want to put effort into finishing it if it's not worth it when I could be writing other unfinished stories of mine. Unfiltered thoughts, please.

Reviews

[Rosie E C…]

I enjoy the character development in this piece.

This is quite a vivid story. I admire your descriptive choice of words.

I also like how each paragraph is so neatly organised.

As a reader, I’ve noticed that you have a great structure throughout the story.

Very well written.

[BellaBee]

Thank you so much!!

[Carrie]

Agreed unfinished. It's like reading about someone looking in a mirror. Ther's really no plot. There are throughs, ideas like reading someone's private diary. I hope this helps.