When you first meet Mara, you may not think much of her. You might think she’s nice, charming enough. Then you might feel… there’s something familiar about her. In her voice and her eyes, she expects you to feel it. But that familiar feeling is false.
She appears so perfect that when you look at her, you want to see yourself. It’d mean you’re a little perfect too. So you find yourself engaging with the illusion of yourself instead of her. You yourself are riveting.
See, she lives underwater in a vat of liquid ambrosia, drink of the gods that she never drinks. And when you look at her from outside, what you see is mostly your own reflection, with sliver refractions of the real her.
“My life is amazing.” she says, “But I’m stuck in Groundhog Day.” The day she relives again and again is an idyllic day. In her vat of ambrosia, too perfect, perfection all around her. She’s perfectly happy, but she knows that’s not right. Something has to change, but what do you change when you’re swimming in perfection? Of course she thinks she’s imperfect, but that’s the critical hesitation which makes it so. She keeps one foot blocking the drain at the bottom of her vat of ambrosia, unwilling to let perfection go. It means she can’t leave. She won’t allow her perfection to drain away.
You don’t pull her out of the vat, but she may invite you in. If she invites you to come underwater in her vat of ambrosia, watch out! She likes things very clean. She’ll throw acid in your face, erasing any mask you’re wearing. Opens you up to feel your own truths stuck inside. Painful, so she uses laughter as a sedative while she peels off all the dead skin that used to protect your thoughtful insides from coming out. And so they come out. She picks through them. She wants to know if you have your own vat of ambrosia.
She’s happy to invite the occasional visitor inside, but what she really wants is someone with their own vat. Someone equally unavailable, at least to start. She wants a reflection of herself all to herself, with maybe a little refraction of who’s really behind it. If the vats align, maybe they can be fused together, maybe just a single pane of glass between them. But first she has to find someone with their own vat. Someone who is ok with perfect Mara keeping hers.
There’s one kind of visitor she often encounters. The worst kind - for both her and the visitor. The kind of person who has very little of the ambrosia perfection she has so very much of. The kind of person who has the same thirst for it that she used to have. She didn’t use to have a whole vat of ambrosia - it took a lifetime to accumulate. She experienced serious suffering before accumulating this vat of ambrosia, you can hear it in her voice. Thirsty people recognize it. Her voice lures them in. It’s a mix of prior suffering and perfection acquired, evidence that the thirst can be quenched. She speaks the way she wishes she was once spoken to. She speaks in a way that those thirsty people want to be spoken to. And when a thirsty visitor dips their toes in her vat of ambrosia, they picture themselves living in that vat. The best thing a thirsty person can do is leave her be. They haven’t learned to handle all that ambrosia perfection, so they’ll only make a mess of the vat. But they can come back when they’ve accumulated their own vat of ambrosia. She would like that.