i. She called herself ugly but she didn't really
believe it, most of the time. She said a lot of things
she didn't mean actually, and she almost never said
what she did mean because she had learnt the hard way
that some people listened better when she lied.
She was adaptable; she was Maria to family, Marianne
to her lovers, and Carol to her friends in the quasi-pretentious
uptown restaurants and bars that she sometimes
frequented, and she was iridescent, she was a
shining star, she was the gorgeous kind of ugly,
and she knew it.
She knew it.

ii. Her decline was fast; she'd never really been
on stable ground, and all it took was a little push.
The funny thing about losing your mind is that it's
kind of like gravity; it's so easy to fall down a hole
but just as difficult to climb back out
(which is not the same as saying each action
has an equal and opposite reaction- that would
describe any resistance during the descent to insanity, which isn't often present.)  And she really had no business going crazy,
but along with adaptability, she was blessed with
a stubborn persistence to defy both expectations
and laws of nature (she never tried jumping off a building
because she was afraid she'd fly away.)

iii. I could fill a book with reasons: reasons why she
went crazy, reasons why your great-aunts favorite dresser
is sitting in your cluttered house and not your
obnoxiously wealthy sister's sprawling mansion,
reasons why suicide by leaping off a
building (almost) never ends in automated flight,
but no explanation will solve the nasty problem
of mental hospital overpopulation
or cause an oversized dresser to fall on your sister's
expensively-styled head.
Usually.

iv. She made neat rows of post-it notes on her mirror
(it wasn't really hers, but it took far too long to think
my not really boyfriendheismoreofsomeoneelseIdon'tknow's mirror so she ignored this)
and every morning she would add a new one, and sometimes,
for self-assurence, she'd read through the immaculate,
colorful rows and remember
she is not a poem. She is not a heavy physics textbook.
She is not an artichoke heart. She is not her mother,
or a skyscraper that ripped a hole in a cloud, or the exact
shade of red her aunt turned when she read the note
attached to the brand new old dresser now in her room.
And as long as she knew what she wasn't, everything
else would fall into place,
wouldn't it?

v.  If her story is good, she'll find a place of her own,
and though she'll probably never be sane, at least
she'll be happy and go on ahead, but stories are bad
more often than not, and though she'll never be found
on the ground wrapped in chalk, God knows where else she
may be. Personally, I'd rather not know, and she'll do as
she pleases, or maybe she won't, and even that'll be
all up to her.