I posted the first half of this the other day. This is a 'continued' version.
Mod: Rated for language.
~
She stood at the window, her tank top hanging off her bird-bone shoulders.
She couldn’t think with all this noise. She loved Chicago, but she was not accustomed to living amongst the noise of a city.
She reached up and pulled the elastic out of her hair, letting it tumble down to her waist. Her hair was a contradiction to everything she was. It was thick and long and blonde.
Feet padded softly through the kitchen, reaching her just in time to catch the waves. Gentle fingers ran slowly, delicately through the mass of loose tangles. A warm cheek pressed against her porcelain face.
As he circled his arms around her waist, he was struck yet again by the prominence of her hipbones, her ribs. How many ribs was a girl supposed to have? He’d tried to count them numerous times, but lost count because it always seemed like she had an infinite supply.
She crossed her arms and laced her fingers around his wrists.
“Have you eaten today?” He asked her softly, pulling her backwards into the kitchen.
She stayed silent. He sat her down in a counter chair and crossed quickly to the pantry, pulling out a bag of kettle corn, her favorite. It was something sweet she could eat without feeling enormously guilty.
He plunked it in front of her and leaned on his elbows on the counter, facing her. She popped a piece in her mouth and smirked, sticking her tongue out. And then another and another. She couldn’t help it. His warm brown eyes melted her, wrapped her up in blankets and blankets and warm pillows and honey and milk and cookies.
His eyes fell on her wrists, wrists that had always been tiny and delicate, even before he’d known her. There were fresh marks, puffy and red. He knew enough about cuts to know that she’d just done this this morning.
She didn’t notice his eyes, was still laughing over the kettle corn sticking to her tongue and crunching satisfactorily between her teeth.
He looked at her then, solemnly, and she remembered the sting. She loved that sting. He caught the perverse bliss she was feeling behind her eyes. He caught everything. She lowered her eyes.
“It’s not that big a deal,” she murmured, pushing the bowl of kettle corn slowly away.
He smiled, sadly.
“It is a big deal,” he said, leaning over the counter to kiss the top of her head. She pulled away.
“It wasn’t when you did it…” she said, avoiding his eyes. “But it is when it’s me.”
He watched her for a while, drinking her in. There were times when he simply could not take his eyes off her. This was one of them. Disturbing to him was that he was beginning to discover he found her the most beautiful when she was upset.
“You don’t deserve… the need to do this,” he said, slowly. He had to tread carefully. “I understand the need for the physical pain, baby, I do. But when I did it I was fucked up and high all the time and I was a shitty person. You aren’t like me. You’ll never be like me. You’re beautiful, you’re a beautiful person, and you need to understand that because otherwise… you’re just wasting blood. You’re too good for this.”
She looked up at him, then. She watched his eyes. They were becoming clear and glassy, as they always did when he was upset. She smiled.
“Who are you to judge?” She asked, putting her hands over his. They were clammy. They were always clammy, unlike hers, which were permanently cold. Bad circulation, her mother had always told her. “You love me. You’re blind.”
“If that’s what you believe,” he said, bringing her hand to his face and kissing it gently. “Then I’ll never be able to convince you otherwise. But I see you with more clarity than you give me credit for.” He flipped her hand over and traced the scars and scabs and fresh, red wounds with his soft fingers. “Did you clean these?”
She smiled, rolling her eyes. He caught this.
“I was just making sure,” he let her hand drop to the countertop.
She waited until she had found his eyes, then said: “I don’t do it to be suicidal. You know that. I don’t really do it because of any emotional pain I’m under, either. I’m not under much emotional pain, I don’t think. Maybe that’s my problem, that I don’t realize it, but whatever. That’s not the point. The point is that I do this to myself when thoughts are racing around my head and emotions refuse to sort themselves out and I feel like I’m being lost and thrown around like a leaf on the wind. And the blood makes that go away. It’s an anchor. And in my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with it. We place far too much stock in these bodies of ours. ‘The Miracle of Life’ and all that shit. We’re no miracle. We’re fucked, every one of us. Why not make ourselves bleed? What’s wrong with that? Are we so perfect that we shouldn’t be allowed to make ourselves bleed once in a while?”
She pushed herself off the stool and made her way around the counter to stand in front of him. They were exactly the same height, down to 3 quarters of an inch. Doctoral proof and all.
“I know you love me,” she said, placing her hands on either side of his head and resting her forehead on his own. “But to love me, you have to let me bleed every once in a while.”
He kissed her. “Only if you let me feed you kettle corn every once in a while.”
~
- If I decide to leave this in short story form, this will be the end. I might, however, decide to continue and turn it into a kind of novel/novella project.
- I know it is probably the cheesiest thing you have ever read. When I started writing it, I told myself that I was not going to go overboard. However, when I began writing this I realized that there was no other way to do it. For me at least, the subject of cutting is not something you can write with a psychological realist kind of tone. That is what bugs me about books about people cutting, because they always use this kind of short, choppy, undescriptive prose. I just do not believe that's an accurate representation about the emotions behind cutting. Yeah, I pretty much stayed away from really flowery, extravagant language, and it does get a little choppy (I did that on purpose) but there are also a lot of details and again, it (the dialogue especially) is so full of cheese that I'm almost embarrassed to post it. But no matter. Thank you for reading, review if you would like. I would appreciate it.
And it's well and originally written.
