Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (32/?)
Title: Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (32/?)
Author: Rose Rose682
Rating: nc-17
Pairing: Jack Barakat/Alex Gaskarth
Summary: I’d lost count of how many had gaped at my arm with shocked expressions and open mouths, curious people unsure of whether or not they wanted to know the answer asking, “Did you cut your arm?”
Disclaimer: I own neither ATL or any other real person mentioned in this fic, though I wish for it constantly.
Author's Note: At the bottom.
Masterpost.
Bent over on the end of the bench, I looped my laces together, hair flopping into my eyes and obscuring my sight as my fingers fumbled. A final pull secured my sneakers and I straightened up, tugging my pants up higher on my hips and going to grab my hoodie from my locker.
Instead of seeing my red sweatshirt dangling on a hook where I’d left it, though, I saw Alex pulling it on, shoulders rolling as the fabric covered them and fingers disappearing into the extended sleeves. He turned around, grinning that cheeky smile at me as I copied it with a bemused stare. Alex stuck his hands in the pockets, yanking the hood higher on his neck and offering absolutely no explanation for his random swiping of my clothing.
With no desire to take back my hoodie, I stepped onto the bench separating the lines of lockers, walking over the binders and books splayed out on it. Getting to Alex’s locker, I ignored the curious look that Kellin gave me from the end of the row, tapping the door wider open and rolling my eyes at the mess inside. While I preferred to have my clothes organized and easily accessible, Alex stereotypically never cleaned anything out unless he was forced to, and, apparently, still had goggles from swimming in his junk. This was especially odd, since I didn’t recall him ever using them; he’d scrubbed the chlorine out of his eyes and blinked erratically until they were properly usable after resurfacing when we were doing swimming. Strange.
Dismissing that oddity, I slipped into the gray sweatshirt tossed over the jumbled objects. Shrugging as it slid over my shirt, I smiled to myself, pleased with its softness and ends that rubbed over my knuckles. I clicked Alex’s locker shut and strode back over to the boy, ruffling my hair as I went and grinning goofily.
It was weird, that the class I’d once so intensely despised had become my favorite period since entertaining people were added and actual effort was subtracted from it. Giving up on getting a great grade and somewhat enjoying myself instead was probably a bad decision for the future, but aren’t immediate results always more rewarding than those that take an eternity to earn?
Alex glared at me as I strolled over to him, fake pouting and crossing his arms, fingers completely covered by the folds of my hoodie. He was perfectly aware of how incredibly adorable he was to me and used this to his advantage, becoming agonizingly cute rather than pissy whenever he expressed discontent. Truthfully, this was a fabulous strategy, even more so when we were in school and public, because I couldn’t currently kiss his puckered lips. Rude, really, being so sweet when I wasn’t permitted to taste it.
“You’re an asshole,” he declared, squinted eyes spanning over me as he shook his head, honey hair fluttering and blond stripes shaking with the movement.
“That’s true, but what makes you say it now?” I said, checking the time with the clock on the wall and offering a hand to my boyfriend with a questioning smile, both asking what had suddenly caused him to announce that I was a dick and if we could leave so we weren’t late for science. We needed to collect our appropriate school supplies and cover the entire campus in the next five minutes.
“You look better in my hoodie than I do. Totally not cool.” Alex stated, linking our hands and moving towards the exit, offsetting his fake-annoyed words. I refrained from replying that he was the only reason that I wasn’t in my own clothes, or laughing at the absurdity of him believing that I could ever be more attractive than him in any conceivable circumstances, and silently appreciated Alex’s naivety. While the older boy was obviously incorrect, I’d be insane to object to being viewed falsely positively by someone like him. If he wanted to think that I was hot, then that was great. That was awesome. Super.
I internally contemplated whether or not Alex would call me crazy if I said that he was completely superior to me. I couldn’t think of a defendable opposing argument, but, then again, maybe Alex, so wonderful in my eyes, couldn’t offer a supporting one. Why is it so absurd to us that definitely incredible others hate themselves when we reject compliments as lies? If only our opinions of ourselves were identical to those of random strangers whom we thoughtlessly pass.
___
While I had changed my mind about the desirability of PE, there were some other subjects that I had not improved my opinion of. Specifically, poetry; I still detested it.
It wasn’t that I was irritated by poems of others, exactly; more that I abhorred writing them. The shorter the piece of literature, the more valuable each and every word was. There were no epic poems being formed on notebook paper in high school English, so I, the masochistic perfectionist, obsessed over every fucking individual line and letter, searching endlessly for the precise word that I desired and refusing to scribble out anything less than immaculate. I wasn’t talented with writing, really, but I had enough passion to make my work decent.
Though I did it to myself, getting consumed by details pained my brain, and I’d rather relax than stress my already overly strained mind by putting myself through writing poems. However, my English teacher had proclaimed that this was required, announcing that we were to turn in a poetry packet, composed of five poems that were directly related to the list of prompts provided, in two weeks.
We had time in class to start tackling this challenge, and I’d gone over the prompts, eliminating the boring ones and focusing on those that captured my attention. Being as oddly philosophical and silently serious as I was, the only prompt that I could imagine building a good poem around was: Include the line “Ok, I may have lied.” at either the beginning or end of your poem.
This obviously struck my fancy because I passed about ninety percent of my life lying. But, even though I could easily talk about one of the many sarcastic statements I made that were technically untrue, I’d rather to write a genuine poem about the verity disguised by my excuses. I had an excess of intense emotions about the events of the last year, and it’s so much easier to write beautifully if you care for your topic. So I mentally declared that I could scrap the composition if it ended up too revealing and dangerous to submit, placed the tip of my pencil on the paper, and stared at it.
Because how do you go about describing the idiotic events that had occurred? Poetry is pretty if nothing else, but was it improper to speak romantically of such horrible happenings?
It would certainly be simple to glamorize the cuts to my forearm; they were supposedly created by rose thorns, straight like the flower’s stem, red like its petals. And, pushing back the sleeve of Alex’s hoodie to eye the scar that still marred my arm, I saw something undeniably lovely in it.
I thought that the practice of calling self-harm scars battle scars was ridiculous. Comparing those mental struggles to a war was, to me, idiotic and outrageously inappropriate. I’d read enough to realize when a metaphor was or was not suitable, and that analogy was undeniably incorrect. Jostling with depression - if that was my issue - was not even close to as heroic as voluntarily fighting a battle was.
Maybe those in recovery glossed over their memories to console themselves, but there was absolutely nothing grand about bloody tissues that were already wet with tears coming in contact with mangled hips, snotty noses and stinging eyes when black had infected sky and future happiness was unimaginable, or fingers that stink of bleach shoving open windows.
Nothing, and anyone who argued otherwise hadn’t experienced any of that recently enough to accurately depict it.
That being stated, I, with my strange interest in semantics, had gotten curious as to why both songs and people could be called ‘beautiful’ and looked up its technical definition. Anything that caused great pleasure possessed beauty, and wasn’t that exactly the purpose of self-harming? Wasn’t the relief and indulgence the whole point?
So it was arguable that purposefully injuring yourself was romanticized to heal those who had or currently were slumping through it, but it was also so incontestably dangerous for the innocent and unscarred. Had I had not been introduced to cutting through a medium that exposed it in a glittering light, I would have never gotten curious and answered my questions about the subject by slitting my own skin. My limbs would still be pale, undamaged by translucent purple and stubborn pink. Objectively, I knew that that was how they should be.
Who should be targeted in such a situation? Is it more important to protect the unbroken or beautify reality to revive those for whom it’s too late? Those were questions that ideally wouldn’t be in the consciousness of anyone, but they must be considered. Problematic as the universe was, the population of it and media had to inevitably discuss self-harming and everything related to it, and, additionally, choose whom to relieve when doing so.
It was unlucky, that it’s really impossible to speak of a matter so serious correctly. I, having experienced both the glorification and vilification of self-harm, with the mind of both types of people who could be affected by it, still couldn’t come up with an adequate resolution to the problem. It wasn’t a problem that I had to be worried about, truly, since my probably deplorable poem would only be read by my teacher, and exactly no one else, ever. It was inconceivable that my English teacher would pause from grading poetry to dissect a razor and defile it’s blades. So I, individually, could write senselessly about the lines I’d slashed across myself with any adjectives that I pleased. It was my insignificant decision if I compared the initially blood red cuts on my arm to a delicate rose stem or the abused edge of a razor. Up to me.
But in many other, more influential cases, reckless descriptions couldn’t be tossed around. Veterans would be extremely offended if their service was shown as a carefree game. Cancer survivors would develop a sudden urge to murder if their killed hair, sunken eyes, and sickness was prettified. Mental diseases and torture, though, were regarded differently. It’s usually the ill who are guilty of that crime, so maybe it isn’t really an atrocity. Maybe, maybe not.
I was forced to stop glaring at my notebook when Brendon, sat next to me and previously counting out the beats of his sonnet to himself, jolted me out of my head by saying, “Are you ok?”
I blinked, recalling where and who I was before making some affirmative noise and responding, “I’m thinking.”
Brendon nodded, appeased by my reply, and went back to his work, drumming the edge of the desk as he counted his syllables quietly. I looked at the ticking second hand of the clock at the front of the room and let my sight unfocus again, curious about why Brendon had deemed my excuse acceptable when thinking was, in my opinion, one of the most destructive acts that could be committed.
Eventually, I decided that my whitening scars had caused me more intense pleasure than anything else, and gave in to my poetic predilections, referring to the scrapes I’d collected as ‘pothole scabs’ on my ‘parking lot arms’ and illustrating my wounds with an odd extended rose metaphor. It was melodramatic and insufficient; nicely expressed who I was.
It’s easy to precisely describe something you’ve lived through, and I spoke of cuts romantically and the emotions that were prerequisites to them repulsively. The two should be separated and discussed in that way; that would be best. Apparently, though, that ideal was impossible. Sighing was the only proper response to a realization as genuine and sad as that.
___
I turned in that exposing and depressing poem, typed in perfect size twelve font, black and white, orderly and defectless, everything that I wasn’t. The content of it, though, was purely sarcasm, satire that obviously revealed the true meanings of the words, exactly like the jokes and comments I’d been making.
I saved the inspiration of it for the ending, concluding it with the sentence necessitated by the prompt, “Ok, I may have lied.” Those were the words I would only ever pronounce if I suddenly became courageous and confessed the disturbing truth of my past. Surely my clueless mom would be confused if she learned that I’d been cutting myself when I’d so believably promised that I wouldn’t do such a horrifying thing, laughing at the ridiculousness of the idea while speaking my swear. The explanation for that promise was quite simple; I lied. I lied - two words, clean and concise, difficult to confess without an accompanying chuckle. Something I’d rarely managed.
My teacher praised every poem in the collection the I eventually gave her, titled ‘A Handful of Moments’, specifically applauding my verb choice and powerful closing lines in her loopy cursive. The only comment connected to the piece I boringly called ‘Everything’s Fine’ was ‘wow!’. Exclamation points were overly excited to me and I was confused as to how that poetry could have produced such a reaction in her.
Nothing was said about the subject of it, though; no pen used on discussing my confrontation of such a serious topic or questioning how I knew what falsifying the cause of cuts was like. Maybe the genuine story in that poem, obscured and decorated by metaphors, wasn’t as obvious as I’d expected. Maybe, maybe, maybe - the indefiniteness of ‘maybe’ annoyed me.
I silently examined my hundred percent score with Alex’s hoodie covering both my hands and the edge of the grading paper I grasped, my fingers tucked away and face equally as reserved as I read my teacher’s input. Alex hadn’t taken back his sweatshirt, so I wore it until it was lose and grinned idiotically whenever my boyfriend was in a certain red hoodie.
It was nice, to be reminded by the sweatshirt engulfing me that someone cared when others refused to acknowledge my obvious clues that something was wrong. My English instructor may be more concerned with my writing than me, but Alex gave a fuck. And that was lovely. That deserved gorgeous adjectives and delicate analogies.
That fit the literal definition of beautiful.
____________________
A/N: I took an unintentional hiatus with this, which I apologize for. It shouldn't happen again. And I'm somewhat tired of seeing only the two extremes of the romanticizing self-harm argument, so here's my opinion. What's yours?-Rose
Author: Rose Rose682
Rating: nc-17
Pairing: Jack Barakat/Alex Gaskarth
Summary: I’d lost count of how many had gaped at my arm with shocked expressions and open mouths, curious people unsure of whether or not they wanted to know the answer asking, “Did you cut your arm?”
Disclaimer: I own neither ATL or any other real person mentioned in this fic, though I wish for it constantly.
Author's Note: At the bottom.
Masterpost.
Bent over on the end of the bench, I looped my laces together, hair flopping into my eyes and obscuring my sight as my fingers fumbled. A final pull secured my sneakers and I straightened up, tugging my pants up higher on my hips and going to grab my hoodie from my locker.
Instead of seeing my red sweatshirt dangling on a hook where I’d left it, though, I saw Alex pulling it on, shoulders rolling as the fabric covered them and fingers disappearing into the extended sleeves. He turned around, grinning that cheeky smile at me as I copied it with a bemused stare. Alex stuck his hands in the pockets, yanking the hood higher on his neck and offering absolutely no explanation for his random swiping of my clothing.
With no desire to take back my hoodie, I stepped onto the bench separating the lines of lockers, walking over the binders and books splayed out on it. Getting to Alex’s locker, I ignored the curious look that Kellin gave me from the end of the row, tapping the door wider open and rolling my eyes at the mess inside. While I preferred to have my clothes organized and easily accessible, Alex stereotypically never cleaned anything out unless he was forced to, and, apparently, still had goggles from swimming in his junk. This was especially odd, since I didn’t recall him ever using them; he’d scrubbed the chlorine out of his eyes and blinked erratically until they were properly usable after resurfacing when we were doing swimming. Strange.
Dismissing that oddity, I slipped into the gray sweatshirt tossed over the jumbled objects. Shrugging as it slid over my shirt, I smiled to myself, pleased with its softness and ends that rubbed over my knuckles. I clicked Alex’s locker shut and strode back over to the boy, ruffling my hair as I went and grinning goofily.
It was weird, that the class I’d once so intensely despised had become my favorite period since entertaining people were added and actual effort was subtracted from it. Giving up on getting a great grade and somewhat enjoying myself instead was probably a bad decision for the future, but aren’t immediate results always more rewarding than those that take an eternity to earn?
Alex glared at me as I strolled over to him, fake pouting and crossing his arms, fingers completely covered by the folds of my hoodie. He was perfectly aware of how incredibly adorable he was to me and used this to his advantage, becoming agonizingly cute rather than pissy whenever he expressed discontent. Truthfully, this was a fabulous strategy, even more so when we were in school and public, because I couldn’t currently kiss his puckered lips. Rude, really, being so sweet when I wasn’t permitted to taste it.
“You’re an asshole,” he declared, squinted eyes spanning over me as he shook his head, honey hair fluttering and blond stripes shaking with the movement.
“That’s true, but what makes you say it now?” I said, checking the time with the clock on the wall and offering a hand to my boyfriend with a questioning smile, both asking what had suddenly caused him to announce that I was a dick and if we could leave so we weren’t late for science. We needed to collect our appropriate school supplies and cover the entire campus in the next five minutes.
“You look better in my hoodie than I do. Totally not cool.” Alex stated, linking our hands and moving towards the exit, offsetting his fake-annoyed words. I refrained from replying that he was the only reason that I wasn’t in my own clothes, or laughing at the absurdity of him believing that I could ever be more attractive than him in any conceivable circumstances, and silently appreciated Alex’s naivety. While the older boy was obviously incorrect, I’d be insane to object to being viewed falsely positively by someone like him. If he wanted to think that I was hot, then that was great. That was awesome. Super.
I internally contemplated whether or not Alex would call me crazy if I said that he was completely superior to me. I couldn’t think of a defendable opposing argument, but, then again, maybe Alex, so wonderful in my eyes, couldn’t offer a supporting one. Why is it so absurd to us that definitely incredible others hate themselves when we reject compliments as lies? If only our opinions of ourselves were identical to those of random strangers whom we thoughtlessly pass.
___
While I had changed my mind about the desirability of PE, there were some other subjects that I had not improved my opinion of. Specifically, poetry; I still detested it.
It wasn’t that I was irritated by poems of others, exactly; more that I abhorred writing them. The shorter the piece of literature, the more valuable each and every word was. There were no epic poems being formed on notebook paper in high school English, so I, the masochistic perfectionist, obsessed over every fucking individual line and letter, searching endlessly for the precise word that I desired and refusing to scribble out anything less than immaculate. I wasn’t talented with writing, really, but I had enough passion to make my work decent.
Though I did it to myself, getting consumed by details pained my brain, and I’d rather relax than stress my already overly strained mind by putting myself through writing poems. However, my English teacher had proclaimed that this was required, announcing that we were to turn in a poetry packet, composed of five poems that were directly related to the list of prompts provided, in two weeks.
We had time in class to start tackling this challenge, and I’d gone over the prompts, eliminating the boring ones and focusing on those that captured my attention. Being as oddly philosophical and silently serious as I was, the only prompt that I could imagine building a good poem around was: Include the line “Ok, I may have lied.” at either the beginning or end of your poem.
This obviously struck my fancy because I passed about ninety percent of my life lying. But, even though I could easily talk about one of the many sarcastic statements I made that were technically untrue, I’d rather to write a genuine poem about the verity disguised by my excuses. I had an excess of intense emotions about the events of the last year, and it’s so much easier to write beautifully if you care for your topic. So I mentally declared that I could scrap the composition if it ended up too revealing and dangerous to submit, placed the tip of my pencil on the paper, and stared at it.
Because how do you go about describing the idiotic events that had occurred? Poetry is pretty if nothing else, but was it improper to speak romantically of such horrible happenings?
It would certainly be simple to glamorize the cuts to my forearm; they were supposedly created by rose thorns, straight like the flower’s stem, red like its petals. And, pushing back the sleeve of Alex’s hoodie to eye the scar that still marred my arm, I saw something undeniably lovely in it.
I thought that the practice of calling self-harm scars battle scars was ridiculous. Comparing those mental struggles to a war was, to me, idiotic and outrageously inappropriate. I’d read enough to realize when a metaphor was or was not suitable, and that analogy was undeniably incorrect. Jostling with depression - if that was my issue - was not even close to as heroic as voluntarily fighting a battle was.
Maybe those in recovery glossed over their memories to console themselves, but there was absolutely nothing grand about bloody tissues that were already wet with tears coming in contact with mangled hips, snotty noses and stinging eyes when black had infected sky and future happiness was unimaginable, or fingers that stink of bleach shoving open windows.
Nothing, and anyone who argued otherwise hadn’t experienced any of that recently enough to accurately depict it.
That being stated, I, with my strange interest in semantics, had gotten curious as to why both songs and people could be called ‘beautiful’ and looked up its technical definition. Anything that caused great pleasure possessed beauty, and wasn’t that exactly the purpose of self-harming? Wasn’t the relief and indulgence the whole point?
So it was arguable that purposefully injuring yourself was romanticized to heal those who had or currently were slumping through it, but it was also so incontestably dangerous for the innocent and unscarred. Had I had not been introduced to cutting through a medium that exposed it in a glittering light, I would have never gotten curious and answered my questions about the subject by slitting my own skin. My limbs would still be pale, undamaged by translucent purple and stubborn pink. Objectively, I knew that that was how they should be.
Who should be targeted in such a situation? Is it more important to protect the unbroken or beautify reality to revive those for whom it’s too late? Those were questions that ideally wouldn’t be in the consciousness of anyone, but they must be considered. Problematic as the universe was, the population of it and media had to inevitably discuss self-harming and everything related to it, and, additionally, choose whom to relieve when doing so.
It was unlucky, that it’s really impossible to speak of a matter so serious correctly. I, having experienced both the glorification and vilification of self-harm, with the mind of both types of people who could be affected by it, still couldn’t come up with an adequate resolution to the problem. It wasn’t a problem that I had to be worried about, truly, since my probably deplorable poem would only be read by my teacher, and exactly no one else, ever. It was inconceivable that my English teacher would pause from grading poetry to dissect a razor and defile it’s blades. So I, individually, could write senselessly about the lines I’d slashed across myself with any adjectives that I pleased. It was my insignificant decision if I compared the initially blood red cuts on my arm to a delicate rose stem or the abused edge of a razor. Up to me.
But in many other, more influential cases, reckless descriptions couldn’t be tossed around. Veterans would be extremely offended if their service was shown as a carefree game. Cancer survivors would develop a sudden urge to murder if their killed hair, sunken eyes, and sickness was prettified. Mental diseases and torture, though, were regarded differently. It’s usually the ill who are guilty of that crime, so maybe it isn’t really an atrocity. Maybe, maybe not.
I was forced to stop glaring at my notebook when Brendon, sat next to me and previously counting out the beats of his sonnet to himself, jolted me out of my head by saying, “Are you ok?”
I blinked, recalling where and who I was before making some affirmative noise and responding, “I’m thinking.”
Brendon nodded, appeased by my reply, and went back to his work, drumming the edge of the desk as he counted his syllables quietly. I looked at the ticking second hand of the clock at the front of the room and let my sight unfocus again, curious about why Brendon had deemed my excuse acceptable when thinking was, in my opinion, one of the most destructive acts that could be committed.
Eventually, I decided that my whitening scars had caused me more intense pleasure than anything else, and gave in to my poetic predilections, referring to the scrapes I’d collected as ‘pothole scabs’ on my ‘parking lot arms’ and illustrating my wounds with an odd extended rose metaphor. It was melodramatic and insufficient; nicely expressed who I was.
It’s easy to precisely describe something you’ve lived through, and I spoke of cuts romantically and the emotions that were prerequisites to them repulsively. The two should be separated and discussed in that way; that would be best. Apparently, though, that ideal was impossible. Sighing was the only proper response to a realization as genuine and sad as that.
___
I turned in that exposing and depressing poem, typed in perfect size twelve font, black and white, orderly and defectless, everything that I wasn’t. The content of it, though, was purely sarcasm, satire that obviously revealed the true meanings of the words, exactly like the jokes and comments I’d been making.
I saved the inspiration of it for the ending, concluding it with the sentence necessitated by the prompt, “Ok, I may have lied.” Those were the words I would only ever pronounce if I suddenly became courageous and confessed the disturbing truth of my past. Surely my clueless mom would be confused if she learned that I’d been cutting myself when I’d so believably promised that I wouldn’t do such a horrifying thing, laughing at the ridiculousness of the idea while speaking my swear. The explanation for that promise was quite simple; I lied. I lied - two words, clean and concise, difficult to confess without an accompanying chuckle. Something I’d rarely managed.
My teacher praised every poem in the collection the I eventually gave her, titled ‘A Handful of Moments’, specifically applauding my verb choice and powerful closing lines in her loopy cursive. The only comment connected to the piece I boringly called ‘Everything’s Fine’ was ‘wow!’. Exclamation points were overly excited to me and I was confused as to how that poetry could have produced such a reaction in her.
Nothing was said about the subject of it, though; no pen used on discussing my confrontation of such a serious topic or questioning how I knew what falsifying the cause of cuts was like. Maybe the genuine story in that poem, obscured and decorated by metaphors, wasn’t as obvious as I’d expected. Maybe, maybe, maybe - the indefiniteness of ‘maybe’ annoyed me.
I silently examined my hundred percent score with Alex’s hoodie covering both my hands and the edge of the grading paper I grasped, my fingers tucked away and face equally as reserved as I read my teacher’s input. Alex hadn’t taken back his sweatshirt, so I wore it until it was lose and grinned idiotically whenever my boyfriend was in a certain red hoodie.
It was nice, to be reminded by the sweatshirt engulfing me that someone cared when others refused to acknowledge my obvious clues that something was wrong. My English instructor may be more concerned with my writing than me, but Alex gave a fuck. And that was lovely. That deserved gorgeous adjectives and delicate analogies.
That fit the literal definition of beautiful.
____________________
A/N: I took an unintentional hiatus with this, which I apologize for. It shouldn't happen again. And I'm somewhat tired of seeing only the two extremes of the romanticizing self-harm argument, so here's my opinion. What's yours?-Rose