Shattered Wings, Silent Scars

Previously

…"You think you need pretty things?" he’d said, his voice dangerously low, his eyes cold and empty. "You don’t deserve pretty. You deserve what you get." He threw the broken, multicolored shards into the hallway trash bin. Watching those fragments of color disappear solidified the first great lesson of my life: beauty was fleeting, and anything good I tried to create would inevitably be destroyed, often painfully. The seed of self-loathing had taken root, watered by abuse, watered by the constant, gnawing understanding that I was perpetually responsible for the unhappiness of the man