Scar Tissue
For the first time since 1999, I will be living with family.  I am dreading the thought of sharing a roof with people I barely know, with scant privacy.  It goes much deeper than simply annoyance, pride, or the usual family woes.  I have a much stronger fear, one that consumes me as I stare at my weary flesh in the mirror before each shower.

I was under a bad star

It is the first time I will be living with family since I began seriously, major scar leaving and blood pouring out, cutting.  I left my mother's home with faded tiny scars upon my stomach and thighs.  I move now to my father's, with hundreds of deep raised lines and strange white tracks upon my skin.  And I simply do not think that blaming it on my non-existent cat will suffice.  For the first time, I must be hypervigilant daily about covering scars, watching when I injure (if I find a chance at all).  I am terrified of capture.  I am the 

turn on the jukebox, earn a new scar

fox who has been robbing the henhouse undetected for years, only now to be caught in a trap with chicken feathers guiltily plastered to my teeth.  And I hear the farmer's footsteps.  .


I attempt to count my scars, the proof I have that I have survived pain, survived something (for memory is a wicked woman, and she often twists me about in her web of "was it or wasn't it real?" until I cry out and plunge myself into the waters of despair, praying to be renewed and cleansed through scarlet baptism.  It is rather hard to get an accurate figure for the wounds I bear;  some have faded so as to be indiscernible without eyestrain, while some, like the massacre that is my thigh, are so abundant as to make it

I am starvation and I am eating out my heart

 impossible to know where one ends and another begins.  I have the whole gamut of scars, from faint silvery lines, to gashes that needed yet never received stitches, to horrible blotches of second degree burns courtesy of my trusty Bic.  (You would think that would be a tip off, given I do not smoke).  I wager there are at least 200 marks upon me, with many more long since faded away.  They may fade upon this warm canvass, but in my mind's eye, I still see them, still see the blade, my tears, the painful agony of tight jeans rubbing upon a burned and bandaged thigh, all the while smiling and being normal in seminar class, snapping a rubber band against my wrist to feel something in an empty ache of nothing.  Touching the razorblade hidden within my wallet, feeling secure knowing it is there, it's always there, my friend. 

You are a good friend; you are so slicing me apart (Pepper McGowan)

 Metal personified is frightening.  But it is my reality.  I remember the time I burned my arm ten minutes before having to go to work, taking a break so my friend could help me bandage it better, typing while the muscles screamed from the depth of my destruction.  Watching my decay. 

Take all these strings they call my veins

I caress my scars, with a love-hate for that which they testify to.  They tell my story;  they record my days and validate my feelings in a world scarcely interested in what I wish to say.  They are my screams at 3am, the whispers of truths I do not dare speak aloud for fear I will not be believed.  They are something tangibly mine, something no one can repossess, deny me, or take away.  They are my past, and my present, and hopefully not

Wrap them around every fucking thing

 my entire future.  They are my turn at hurting me - as everyone else has already taken their turn.  And I will outdo them all.  I will hurt me best.   

I want to bleed, show the world all the I have inside

A friend suggested that moving home would be good for me, as it would help me not injure.  I then replied that I would be isolated in an unloving environment with no privacy and no means of calming myself in severe distress, unable to speak my truths for fear of being overheard. 

He came to see the disaster as clearly as I;  we both know this may be my demise.

Or it may be the demise of my self-destructive ways. 

Ha.  Get real.

I am Drawn to the Fire.  I am its willing servant.

I want to scream, let the blood flow that keeps me alive

Someday, I would like to unravel my scars from within my guise of conjured normalcy and reveal all to my unsuspecting audience.  I shall prepare popcorn for the

Won't you let me take you for a ride?  You can stop the world... but you won't change me  (Cold)

 day, for my great performance.  I will casually slide my pant leg up and display the results of exacto blade meeting flesh in a violet symphony.  I will allow them to feel the Braille upon my flesh, read my story through their fingertips.  They will be angry.  They will be in awe.  They will not understand.

They never have understood.  And they never will..

Ohio Blue.