literature

Permanent

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Literature Text

When I was young, I used to go to bed on my stomach. Legs thrown outward onto the bed and my arms folded under my favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pillow. When I woke, after several hours of sweet uninterrupted sleep, my arms would still be sleeping. Tingly and warm, but numb for the most part. With sleepy arms came wormy discolored lines that plastered my pale hands and wrists.

As a child, I believed there was something wrong with me. No one else had the strange lines that littered their hands. I told my mom I wanted to go to the doctor and when she asked me why I told her about the lines that would appear after I would wake up. She laughed. I wanted to cry because she had scoffed at my misfortune. Didn't she know that I might have some weird and rare disease that did this to me? She then asked me why my eyes were watering and I told her. She then proceeded to wrap her arms lovingly around me.

I closed my eyes and breathed in my mother's scent while she pulled me back and looked in my eyes and told me,

"Baby, those are from the fabric pressing into you when you sleep. You are perfect. There is nothing in this world wrong with you."

The next morning I woke up once again with the lines and marks, but with waking wisdom, I now knew their origin. I almost believed them a reminder of dreams, beautiful as midnight sun. As I grew so did my wisdom, but so did the pain and aching sadness. I knew the truth of so much that I asked myself why the lines on my arms were only temporary. Why didn't they show me what was on the inside?

Permanence became an obsession. I marked my wrists with those permanent lines because I knew then that there was something wrong and my mother had lied. As the fabric prints faded from my arms like the rising sun, permanent marks became my solace. My arms were now masked with reminders of insecurity and flaws visible to any human eye that cared enough to look.

And so I grew ever more, carrying invisible baggage on forearms much too young. I saw white baby white skin marred with purple lines that ran on my arms like multiple marathons of my beating heart. Finally. Finally someone noticed and made my flaws visible to the world. My reminders became marks of shame. They made me ugly and made the insanity apparent. An undesirable.

My mother looked in my eyes not with the same serene love from all those years ago, but with pain and disappointment plastered in her tears. She laced me into her arms once more, but this time it was not warm and humorous and ever loving. I buried my face into her shoulder while her hug emanated worry and fear and heaps upon heaps of sadness. I felt like a monster or some kind of psychopath. I cried tears of hatred for myself because of the pride I had invested into the stories written in flesh. I cried because I knew I couldn't stop. My story telling and my permanence obsession would not cease and I was losing everything. I cried and then I cut and then I cried and then I cut because I cried and I couldn't stop. This was my life. I had a power to change my skin, I had power over myself and I could feel through the numbness that chilled my bones. I took that power and used it.

I fell deeper and deeper and I had no idea where I was going to land. But I was going to land and when I did land, it was hard and fast. The kind of land that makes your knees buckle and you feel a shiver go through your spine as you absorb the shock. I saw this pain from the outside, I saw my mind magnified while looking down on myself. Was I really so insane? Or had I found a way to put off the pain that others couldn't handle? Was I the genius who figured out how to put the pain at bay?

But I SAW. I saw what I was doing to myself and how the idea of permanence and my stories were taking over my mind and my life. I didn't feel stupid, but I had fallen into the trap of my own thought. If my mothers tears did not get to me, it was my own that did.

And so, a journey was begun. Every day was pain and struggle and my "permanent" scars began to fade. I watched as all my work faded into freckled, milky white skin. it was not my work anymore, it was my mistake. I was imperfect and I was temporary and NOTHING in my world was permanent anymore. I fought myself every morning while staring at my temporary sleep lines, tempted to trace over them with anything sharp enough.

And then there was one day. One day in many that it did not occur to me that I could write a story in the soft dermis. It wasn't until that night falling to slumber that my mind did not wander to scars and eternity. Life wasn't magically easier and this day was not the last, but I found my way.

Stories went to paper, not flesh and my permanence being words and phrases inked into my skin. I wasn't happy yet, or sane or even normal, but for once I could say that I was okay.

And after nine years since I began, I finished. I made a vow to myself that I would not lose myself to emotion, obsession and insanity. I still look down at my arms everyday and I see the faded lines- still purple in the cold autumn air.

I no longer yearn for the sight of my own blood, but I see these scars and I remember my fight and THIS story and my "sleepy lines" and how they too fade. I wander over my limbs and I still see stories, I see beauty, I see strength and weakness. I see what I used to be and who I am now and I smile. I may be marked by insanity or instability, but these... These life lines, I will see them and I will forever shine with pride at their mention because I was stronger and I made it through that inky dark. I emanate beauty and my scars are mine with my imperfect mind, and they are all I need to remember that I survived and I am living now.

Flawed, imperfect, insane, sleeping, awake, telling a story. A story about a life marred by scars, but living with them all the same.  
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© 2011 - 2024 birdsthatflyfree
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color-sekai's avatar
beautiful writing :)