Trigger Warning: Self-harm
A boy I had once loved used to tell me that
every breath we take should be a struggle,
so that when we died no one could say
that we didn’t fight.
He said every cigarette he ever smoked
was a mutiny against his life,
every night he spent alone in his room
was a reminder that the fact
that we didn’t ask to be here
didn’t matter,
that we were all stuck in this game called life
forever.
And we had infinite turns left before
someone could be declared a winner,
so everyday we must smile at strangers
and shake hands with our own demons,
remind ourselves that this pain is only a sign
that we are alive.
He was wrong.
Because every moment hundreds of kids
are picking up a blade for the first time,
and every scar they leave on their skin
will make sure that they never feel okay
stripping in front of a lover.
Every stranger they bring over after a drunken night
will always ask, “What happened?”
And they will never know the answer.
Because how do you tell someone you just met
that you realised at thirteen that this was the life
you weren’t supposed to live?
How do you tell them that
there’s not a story behind every cut,
that sometimes you hurt yourself
just because it was the only way
you could get through the day?
I once spent a night with a girl
with scars in the same places as me,
and we shared silences the size of epiphanies
because neither of us knew what to say.
It was as if we were waiting
for Archimedes to say eureka in his grave
because we had found two pieces of a puzzle
that no one else needed.
If that night had lasted forever
we’d have had no regrets
because as far as our stories go,
that was all we needed to be.
We both refused to keep the lights on
as we made love,
our hands searched for SOS messages
on each other’s skin,
we both knew where to look.
She told me she had once slapped a boy
who had called her cuts battle scars,
for she thought it was unfair that
we were foot soldiers in a war
that other people had privilege to not see.
I never saw her after that night,
but despite being an atheist I say her name
like a prayer every morning,
because I know that she’s somewhere out there,
and this fight — we are in it together.
So everytime someone tells me that
we need to be in pain to feel alive,
I call bullshit on it.
Don’t tell me that we’d have smiled less often
if we didn’t have wounds to nurse,
that our lives would have had no meaning
if they weren’t defined by the scars
that on the best days we call mistakes
and on the worst days,
our identity.
Our scars aren’t love poems etched on our skin
for the world to see,
and you smoking a cigarette
and calling it mutiny
will never be the equivalent of a ten-year-old
locking himself in a room
and cutting open his skin with a paper knife,
because he believed that was his destiny.
So, come here,
put on these shoes and walk a mile.
I dare you to then look at me with a smile,
and tell me that you want your life to be a fight.
– D
The Smol Dittowski 