"No matter how much Charmion seemed to have renounced her innocence, disrobing and revealing more of herself to the world than was appropriate at the time, she held on tightly to the candor of her earlier days, only performing this seductive version of herself inside the highest domes of the vaudeville theaters - a version of herself that rarely manifested itself closer to the ground. The trapeze was her own brand of vodka. Once up in the airs, she would let go of all inhibitions and fears and give way to her deepest desires. For a minute, or two, or ten, she would finally embody the woman she always imagined herself to grow up as: a coquette Betty Boop, the center of all attentions, the unattainable, flying over people's heads only to grace them with her presence for a split second before disappearing behind the scenes.
She tried really hard to maintain the illusion of a strong and independent, yet alluring woman, which did not always work to her advantage. While the mystery she shrouded herself in caught men's attention, her strength discouraged them from ever approaching her, and however progressive her dogmas were, she couldn't help envying the Betty Boops of day to day life who did not need an act to experience the most infinitesimal taste of romance. She decided she would rather purposely distance herself from what she would refer to as "petty suitors", under the pretense of higher standards acquired in France or other, where romanticism was valued, instead of shamefully admitting to herself or to anyone else that no petty suitor had ever dared to court her.
No one ever knew of Charmion's insecurities - and how could they have? She had a gift for only speaking the essential and omitting the superfluous, so that no one even knew where she came from nor where she was ever headed. Secrets would pour into her ears without ever slipping out of her lips, and rumors of her whereabouts always followed her without ever being neither refuted or confirmed. Instead, she kept on displaying a playful, almost childish, facet, which people thought of as an act thoroughly studied in order to dilute her raw and powerful "real" self. She always found that ironic, as she couldn't quite figure out herself which of the sinner or the saint she related the most to.
As people around her were attempting to decipher her personality, she decided she didn't need to define herself within the straight lines that the Victorian society drew for her, and kept breaking and blurring the boundaries between her various selves. She was as precise on a trapeze as she wasn't in her life, drafting stories all over the world only to get bored of them and move on to other places and other faces. Never once did she get to a final chapter, and instead kept traveling the pages of multiple books without ever feeling the need to devour what was left of what she had begun."
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