Tears in Paradise
They built Paradise for looking at, not living in. Every flower frozen in perfect bloom, every wave catching light just so… Time moved strangely here - slow as honey, heavy as expectation. Everything here was arranged to be admired. Everything knew its role.
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Rosalie stood where she was placed, balanced on elegance and restraint, her body held upright by habits older than memory. Silk and structure shaped her into something pleasing, something worthy of being looked at. Her hair rose like a spell half-finished, carrying the echo of thoughts she had folded away for safekeeping.
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Paradise did not ask how she felt. It never did. It offered sweetness instead - abundance, beauty, endless summer - and assumed that would be enough. Bees hovered low, drunk on perfume. Flowers leaned in, curious but indifferent. Time here moved like a warm syrup, slow and clinging, making it easy to forget that moments still pass.
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People were generous with its gifts, handed her sweetness - a small indulgence already dissolving in her hand… She was meant to smile, to be grateful for the abundance. But she had been holding things too long in the heat of performance, watching them melt while pretending they stayed perfect.
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Rosalie had been good for so long. Quiet. Ornamental. The kind of beautiful that doesn't ask questions. But beneath the practiced smile, something had been gathering. The kind of anger that knows how to wait.
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The tear came late, heavy and luminous. It gathered itself with dignity before falling, as if asking whether it was allowed to exist here. When it finally dropped, nothing broke. The sea kept shining. The flowers stayed open. Paradise did not flinch.
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That was what freed her.
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Paradise could hold everything - joy, beauty, excess - but it had no language for grief. It did not reject her tear; it simply didn't need it. And in that indifference, Rosalie understood: she had been performing for an audience that had never truly been watching.
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So she stepped down from the pose she had been holding for so long. Let her shoulders fall, let her spine curve into something comfortable instead of correct. The melting sweetness slipped from her fingers. Some things are meant to dissolve. The effort of being perfect, of matching the scenery, of standing tall on fragile ground, quietly slipped away.
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And then she walked.
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Paradise didn't crumble. It simply stayed, perfect and hollow, radiant and unconcerned.
But Rosalie kept walking, and as she did, something unexpected kindled inside her. A warmth in her chest, a steadiness in her breath. The kind of light that doesn't perform but sustains.
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She realised Paradise was never in the perfect pose or the endless summer or the sweetness handed to her by a world that demanded her stillness in return. It was the freedom to hold herself - messy and melting, furious and tender, imperfect and enough.
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At the edge of everything carefully arranged, she looked back once. Then she turned toward the unknown with something she hadn't felt in years: hope. Not that someone would save her, but that she could save herself. That she could build her own version of beauty, one with room for grief and growth, for falling apart and coming together differently.
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She walked on, shedding petals of performance with each step. What remained was raw and rooted, wild and her own.
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And somewhere in the distance, in a place Paradise could never touch, she began to bloom.