I hope one will open wide, and with pale, newborn skin, I’ll slip through. Maybe the words I write on paper or computer screen will be enough. Maybe one day, I won’t need to write meaning on my flesh. I have left one skin behind, and the new one seems too tender, too colorless. Sometimes I search for a door to bang into, a surface that will collide against elbows and knees. Sometimes it rises to the surface in those accidental dark kisses. Now regret is my companion, sprouting violet and indigo from my heart-muscle, pulsing inside me. But I let it go on too long, till the bruises started to seep deeper, to stain my insides, and I wondered if pain would always be my lover. For a while I needed those marks, needed to know that the sorrow and disappointment and anger within me had substance, had colour, had meaning. I will never bloom purple on my thighs and backside again I will never grow green. I hoard them, stockpile them they remind me of a time I miss so dearly, it feels like a twist of my heart-muscle, a slow drip of blue-black blood. I’d gathered these adornments before and even during my dungeon years, of course – everyone bruises sometimes – but they feel different this time around. Now, I collect bruises more clumsily, scattered and haphazard: little plum kisses on my legs, where a bag bounced against my thighs chartreuse splashes on my forearms and elbows, where I knocked against a wall. “Maybe one day, I won’t need to write meaning on my flesh.” My dark blossoms, I believed, made me special. A part of me wanted the whole world to see them, even if they wouldn’t understand. I had been yearning for these marks my entire life. They revealed what I had always known, or at least suspected: that I loved pain, that pain lived inside me, that it was just waiting to rise up in little bursts of blood against my skin. The stripes were from canes, the blossoms from hands and paddles. I could feel the sore skin rubbing against the fabric of my pants when I walked, against the leather of my chair when I sat down, as if it were whispering secrets only I could hear. Stripes like vines crossing my thighs, flowering up my hips and backside. I used to collect my bruises like jewellery, like a gift I’d been given, or perhaps something even more intimate – tattoos I wished I could make permanent, purple-blue blossoms and yellow-green patterns on my skin.
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