Scarred Girl Heals

inspired by Blythe Baird's "Sad Girls Club"

Scarred Girl Heals by Fransivan MacKenzie
after Blythe Baird

Wild roses never bloomed out of the thin
lines on your left forearm. They are
nothing now but scars - testaments of rage,
hatred, and survival made into a crooked
ladder ghosts could use to climb the attic
perched in the back of your skull. You
don't dance with your specters anymore
but can still recall every pirouette as
if the clock never ticked at all. You still
feel sick looking at them and reckoning your
frail right hand, a lifetime ago, doodling
flowers with markers upon your wounds.
It was harrowing, not gorgeous.

Your thirteen year-old self was neither
buried nor planted, but frozen in your
chest. She couldn't thaw, still, even
a handful of summers later. The sun
shone down on you, blessed your eyelids
good morning and you yawned like an apology.
And didn't you live your life like one?
You said sorry too often you fooled others
into believing your existence was a mistake.
It took you months of therapy to even
acknowledge that a part of you was a deadly
black ice your lovers lost their lives to
trying to slide through.

Your straight As matter in a way that they
always mattered. In paper and in paper
alone. Girl, though you were known for the
golden medallions on her neck, your best
friend still knew each name of the silver
trapezoids in the pockets of your labcoat.
Now, your truth trumps your reputation.
You know too well that secrets make you
sick. And sick doesn't mean pretty. Suffering
isn't interesting unless you're sick.
It's still a struggle to hold onto that,
but I can see you trying. That's the beautiful
part, the one you should pen poems after:
brave soul, you are trying and sometimes
it works, and when it doesn't, you try other
ways until something does. Claw your way out
of the dirt even when your fingers bleed,
until you feel the first touch of sunbeam.

Your throat is no longer an auditorium
of stifled gasps. You don't orchestrate
music with the splashes on the toilet
bowl anymore. There was never a song in
the way you scraped yourself clean like the
bottom of the barrel. I couldn't find
poetry in the way you always shivered
no matter the room temperature. I couldn't
stitch a melody into your midnight sobs.
There was nothing lyrical about your
breakdowns. No matter what metaphors you
used to dress your corpse, you couldn't
hide the stink. Caked make-up over caking rust
makes nothing exquisite. A eulogy is not
a sonnet. A dead girl walking needs help
before she needs a funeral arrangement.

You ran and ran away through crystals and
bottles and blades and butterfly fingers down
your larynx. You worshipped sheer emptiness,
praying for the salvation of being truly full.
You ran and ran away, sprinted towards death
while hoping for life at the end of it. You
skinned your knees to escape your mother's
questions while you were getting high in
your boyfriend's basement. You ran and
ran away, wanting to be a keeper of a promise -
a future yet to be fulfilled by unbecoming.
You wanted to believe that breaking would make
you whole because isn't that what Tumblr told
you when you wanted everything but to be alone?

But you ran and ran towards yourself, too,
dearest, when you fled their cages laced with
roses. Screw those roses - thorny and scarring
your fingertips that were more of white
tissues than skin. You couldn't write sad
prose on their petals with bitemarks on your
brittle fingers. You weren't a princess in a
castle of isolation. You were a prisoner. You
were a slave no matter how many Likes you got
from the Internet. Tumblr notes did not equate
love letters from strangers you would never meet.
Smudged mascaras never made you prettier. Feeling
good about being sick doesn't mean you're not sick.

And now, you're healing. And crimson is a mere
color, not glitter over anything that is rotting.
And you no longer have to unzip your veins to open
up. You give up searching for antidotes in poison
bottles. And you are writing yourself into a
forgiven reality where melancholia is no
longer a muse or a prompt. When you need help,
you call your therapist instead of a steak knife
your brother left in the kitchen sink. And dearest,
I think that it's lovelier than going for three
days without eating anything.

Reviews

[John Alexander McFadyen]

This is such a complete free verse poem that describes in the third person and in detail the journey of a young woman from the confusion and self destruction of mental fragility to self awareness and survival. Amazing detail to touch almost as you describe the deepest fears and feelings and actions that make up such an existence. The lines
"Your thirteen year-old self was neither
buried nor planted, but frozen in your
chest."
are so, so exquisite as they really describe that feeling of being stuck inside oneself.