Anatomy
anatomy; general; r; sora
[[Disturbing themes, including severe body dysmorphic tendencies, and self-injury/mutilation.]]
It's not that you know what 'right' is, or the best ways to ameliorate the situation, because if you did, this would have all been a lot easier.
The anatomy textbooks weren't exactly something that made it into your collection of reading materials. Also unhelpful. You were growing older and older, spindly fingers and spiderweb veins. You had this body, this tomb, this prison from which you could not escape, no matter how hard you wished and begged and pleaded to the stars and whoever else would listen to your prayers.
It was a problem, when nobody gave you answers, at least not the right ones. How were you supposed to fix these errors? How were you supposed to better the situation when nobody bothered to offer any information? There were no corrections, there were no red pen marks where things should have been edited - all you heard was 'wrong'. Wrong, wrong, wrong, bad, wrong.
Shinigami. Shinigami.
You'd spend long hours in front of your mirror sometimes - it was full-length, nice if not only for the series of long, spindly cracks sluicing across the front. You'd just look and look, press curious fingers onto your nose and around your cheekbones and across your ribs - they stuck out, but only a little, hugged tightly by the skin around you. Those were the calm times. Those were the times where you were real, and you were a child, and you merely wanted to explore this foreign, strange vessel with which you had been gifted (cursed?).
Sometimes you would be naked. Sometimes your fingertips would get a lot more wary, and they'd shake and they'd stutter and they'd lose their nerve every once and awhile, jump away from uncharted, forbidden territory as though they'd been frightened. Sometimes you'd press and pull and it was all strange, all very curious, all very ugly. You didn't know why it was 'ugly', why it was 'wrong', and you wished you knew how to fix it. Real boys don't have this. Real girls don't have this.
There were nights where you spent hours and hours, thinking, exploring, obsessing, dwelling, agonizing. There were sometimes when you'd do anything to fix your errors. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, here, it's all better, and I won't do it again.
Fire was used as a cleanser, in some places, with thick and overgrown forests. The fire would be ignited in a particularly strongly wooded area, and would burn through the brush, the overabundant plant life, leaving behind ash that was rich in nutrients. The rain would soak the nutrients into the soil, and within a few weeks, green would emerge from the ash. The new vegetation would thrive. The forest would begin anew; restarted by something that seemed so very destructive, at first sight.
You know this. You have read about this. And yet you're not sure you believe this to be entirely true.
For you, fire only left behind angry marks, red marks that blistered and ached and stung to the touch - your clothes would rub against the affected skin, and it would hurt. Your skin was hot when your fingers explore down there now, so so hot that you were sure something had to have been melting inside of you, something terrible. But nothing changed. Nothing was cleansed, nothing began anew. It just hurt. It hurt and hurt.
Maybe you weren't a forest. Maybe you weren't meant to start anew. You were six years old and the matches had been skittered around you, like confetti, like artwork. You hated them, for not helping. You forgave them, for trying. It might not have been the matches' fault. This was you that you were dealing with, after all.
But then you're nine, and you think of creation. You read Sewing 101: A Beginner's Guide, and you pay more attention to these new things that you'd never noticed before, like thread and buttons and seams. You look at all the tiny workings of your clothing - the fabric, the strings that crisscross and make up the cotton.
You find some sewing needles and thread that one of Them has discarded, and you set to work. It starts small, tiny X's into your clothing, just so you can get the hang of things. You sewed up the end of a sleeve once, and then removed the stitches, to see what it looked like. You learn to fix the new tears, the tiny, circular scorch marks straight through the arms of your shirt. You can improve on so many things with just a book and a small needle.
There's one morning - early, early early, where you spend extra time to thread the needle right. Black thread, a very precise and no-nonsense shade. You thread the needle, you pull the ends taut, and just as you fixed the unwanted holes in your clothing... Well, the sentiment was similar, wasn't it? Transposed onto a different location. Your pants are clean, freshly laundered, and folded neatly beside you.
The first is the easiest.
The second pinches.
By the third stitch, your eyes are so thick with tears that you can't see anymore, and your hands tremble and shake as you gently tug at the thread one way, a hiss of pain, then the other, oh, gosh, it hurts so much, and realize this isn't working, that you can't fix anything, all over again. There are drops of blood - you think, you can hardly see through the blur - and you start to panic, your heart hammering in your chest, a staccato rhythm against your ribcage.
You have to wait hours to calm yourself down, to finally remove what damage had been done, what you'd started. It burned, there was blood on your fingers, there was so much time that you spent in a place that you didn't want to explore - you'd been trying to help, you'd been trying to help.
Looking back onto it later, you figure the adrenaline was the only thing that had gotten you so far, why you didn't stop before the needle even went in. Yes. That had to have been it. It was a miracle nothing had gotten infected. Once again, you'd left yourself without a way to sit down without things aching and twinging.
It's not that such fervent self-loathing was a concept that was anything new to you, perhaps just a more active one. Despite everything, despite your own constant derision, the fixation, the calm inward remarks about your standing as a human being (or lack thereof), there had always been that tiny, blissful voice - a woman's, for some reason, and soft like grass. There'd been the tiny glimmer in the back of your head, that said that you had a chance, if you could just only make things better, if you could just PROVE yourself, somehow, and you were so eager to make yourself something other than 'in the way'.
That voice was fast disappearing. Sometimes you'd lie there at night, tensed, in the corner of your room, aching to hear it - striving, searching, pleading. It seemed like the more you wanted it there, the more it faded. You bridled so much hatred for this body that wouldn't listen to reason, that couldn't please anyone, that was always wrong and awful and you couldn't have listed evidence, only causes.
There is so much you don't know... There is so much you ache to understand, if only you could better the situation with the information.
You're ten years old when you take the knife to yourself, years before anyone else in this household could have.
It's a part, it's in the forbidden Down There. It protrudes, and the skin is soft, but not smooth. It serves no function. Perhaps that was what they had been referring to. Perhaps it was what was wrong. You know you're scrabbling, and you know you're desperate. The wound is deep enough that you have to, ironically, have stitches. Ten of them, little lines, all in a row. There's shouting, screaming later - it's not bad enough? You want to make it worse now?
How troublesome. How bothersome. How expensive.
There comes a point where you can taste defeat thick in your teeth then, where it drains down the back of your throat like a poison and it coils deep inside of you. There comes a point where you just stop looking all together, where your own body isn't just something to be hated and frowned upon, it's to be feared, it's to be ignored and tucked away where nobody can see any of it, can't talk about it, can't think about it.
There comes a point where you just stop trying to fix things, because you're sick of trying so hard for someone who doesn't even matter.
[[Disturbing themes, including severe body dysmorphic tendencies, and self-injury/mutilation.]]
It's not that you know what 'right' is, or the best ways to ameliorate the situation, because if you did, this would have all been a lot easier.
The anatomy textbooks weren't exactly something that made it into your collection of reading materials. Also unhelpful. You were growing older and older, spindly fingers and spiderweb veins. You had this body, this tomb, this prison from which you could not escape, no matter how hard you wished and begged and pleaded to the stars and whoever else would listen to your prayers.
It was a problem, when nobody gave you answers, at least not the right ones. How were you supposed to fix these errors? How were you supposed to better the situation when nobody bothered to offer any information? There were no corrections, there were no red pen marks where things should have been edited - all you heard was 'wrong'. Wrong, wrong, wrong, bad, wrong.
Shinigami. Shinigami.
You'd spend long hours in front of your mirror sometimes - it was full-length, nice if not only for the series of long, spindly cracks sluicing across the front. You'd just look and look, press curious fingers onto your nose and around your cheekbones and across your ribs - they stuck out, but only a little, hugged tightly by the skin around you. Those were the calm times. Those were the times where you were real, and you were a child, and you merely wanted to explore this foreign, strange vessel with which you had been gifted (cursed?).
Sometimes you would be naked. Sometimes your fingertips would get a lot more wary, and they'd shake and they'd stutter and they'd lose their nerve every once and awhile, jump away from uncharted, forbidden territory as though they'd been frightened. Sometimes you'd press and pull and it was all strange, all very curious, all very ugly. You didn't know why it was 'ugly', why it was 'wrong', and you wished you knew how to fix it. Real boys don't have this. Real girls don't have this.
There were nights where you spent hours and hours, thinking, exploring, obsessing, dwelling, agonizing. There were sometimes when you'd do anything to fix your errors. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, here, it's all better, and I won't do it again.
Fire was used as a cleanser, in some places, with thick and overgrown forests. The fire would be ignited in a particularly strongly wooded area, and would burn through the brush, the overabundant plant life, leaving behind ash that was rich in nutrients. The rain would soak the nutrients into the soil, and within a few weeks, green would emerge from the ash. The new vegetation would thrive. The forest would begin anew; restarted by something that seemed so very destructive, at first sight.
You know this. You have read about this. And yet you're not sure you believe this to be entirely true.
For you, fire only left behind angry marks, red marks that blistered and ached and stung to the touch - your clothes would rub against the affected skin, and it would hurt. Your skin was hot when your fingers explore down there now, so so hot that you were sure something had to have been melting inside of you, something terrible. But nothing changed. Nothing was cleansed, nothing began anew. It just hurt. It hurt and hurt.
Maybe you weren't a forest. Maybe you weren't meant to start anew. You were six years old and the matches had been skittered around you, like confetti, like artwork. You hated them, for not helping. You forgave them, for trying. It might not have been the matches' fault. This was you that you were dealing with, after all.
But then you're nine, and you think of creation. You read Sewing 101: A Beginner's Guide, and you pay more attention to these new things that you'd never noticed before, like thread and buttons and seams. You look at all the tiny workings of your clothing - the fabric, the strings that crisscross and make up the cotton.
You find some sewing needles and thread that one of Them has discarded, and you set to work. It starts small, tiny X's into your clothing, just so you can get the hang of things. You sewed up the end of a sleeve once, and then removed the stitches, to see what it looked like. You learn to fix the new tears, the tiny, circular scorch marks straight through the arms of your shirt. You can improve on so many things with just a book and a small needle.
There's one morning - early, early early, where you spend extra time to thread the needle right. Black thread, a very precise and no-nonsense shade. You thread the needle, you pull the ends taut, and just as you fixed the unwanted holes in your clothing... Well, the sentiment was similar, wasn't it? Transposed onto a different location. Your pants are clean, freshly laundered, and folded neatly beside you.
The first is the easiest.
The second pinches.
By the third stitch, your eyes are so thick with tears that you can't see anymore, and your hands tremble and shake as you gently tug at the thread one way, a hiss of pain, then the other, oh, gosh, it hurts so much, and realize this isn't working, that you can't fix anything, all over again. There are drops of blood - you think, you can hardly see through the blur - and you start to panic, your heart hammering in your chest, a staccato rhythm against your ribcage.
You have to wait hours to calm yourself down, to finally remove what damage had been done, what you'd started. It burned, there was blood on your fingers, there was so much time that you spent in a place that you didn't want to explore - you'd been trying to help, you'd been trying to help.
Looking back onto it later, you figure the adrenaline was the only thing that had gotten you so far, why you didn't stop before the needle even went in. Yes. That had to have been it. It was a miracle nothing had gotten infected. Once again, you'd left yourself without a way to sit down without things aching and twinging.
It's not that such fervent self-loathing was a concept that was anything new to you, perhaps just a more active one. Despite everything, despite your own constant derision, the fixation, the calm inward remarks about your standing as a human being (or lack thereof), there had always been that tiny, blissful voice - a woman's, for some reason, and soft like grass. There'd been the tiny glimmer in the back of your head, that said that you had a chance, if you could just only make things better, if you could just PROVE yourself, somehow, and you were so eager to make yourself something other than 'in the way'.
That voice was fast disappearing. Sometimes you'd lie there at night, tensed, in the corner of your room, aching to hear it - striving, searching, pleading. It seemed like the more you wanted it there, the more it faded. You bridled so much hatred for this body that wouldn't listen to reason, that couldn't please anyone, that was always wrong and awful and you couldn't have listed evidence, only causes.
There is so much you don't know... There is so much you ache to understand, if only you could better the situation with the information.
You're ten years old when you take the knife to yourself, years before anyone else in this household could have.
It's a part, it's in the forbidden Down There. It protrudes, and the skin is soft, but not smooth. It serves no function. Perhaps that was what they had been referring to. Perhaps it was what was wrong. You know you're scrabbling, and you know you're desperate. The wound is deep enough that you have to, ironically, have stitches. Ten of them, little lines, all in a row. There's shouting, screaming later - it's not bad enough? You want to make it worse now?
How troublesome. How bothersome. How expensive.
There comes a point where you can taste defeat thick in your teeth then, where it drains down the back of your throat like a poison and it coils deep inside of you. There comes a point where you just stop looking all together, where your own body isn't just something to be hated and frowned upon, it's to be feared, it's to be ignored and tucked away where nobody can see any of it, can't talk about it, can't think about it.
There comes a point where you just stop trying to fix things, because you're sick of trying so hard for someone who doesn't even matter.