Cuts

A Story by Yangy

Someone goes through a hard breakup, but in the end everything starts to improve

Cuts

Cut. She hurt me; put me through so much pain, made me bend my ways, my habits, my entire personality to suit her. Another cut. Endless nights awake in tears because of some other issue, sleepless weeks of me working to fix things. More cuts. She told me that she didn’t care, that everything was my fault. She told me that she didn’t love me, and then she did. More cuts, cuts up and down my arm; sleeves on my arms. Cuts for every night, cuts for everything that was said and cuts for everything that was thought. She made me worry, she made me paranoid for reasons I don’t understand. Cuts for when she’d rip my heart from my chest and crush it between her beautiful, devil-like fingers. So many cuts. Too many cuts. Another and another and another. The knife is her kind serpent tongue and my body is my mind.

The cuts are tragically beautiful, like love. Love for every time she hurt me, for every time she smiled with disappointment or frowned with joy. Love for the cruel innocence, and the way she made me hurt. My arms are nothing but cuts. The pain of it all embraced me when she didn’t. The pain held my hand when I needed it most but she couldn’t be there for me. I’d always promise to do whatever was needed to fix it, but it was never enough or overdone. More cuts, on my legs. The people that cared about me told me that it was killing me; that the love- No, hate. Still not right, the passion for me that she had was tearing my soul apart like a small child with their gifts at Christmas.

The emptiness I feel now she is gone is like a vacuum in my stomach. Sucking me into myself, crippling my posture. I try to portray happy and smile for others but I’m putting too much effort into trying to forget, to oppress the memory, to ignore everything that reminds me of her. Three more cuts. I try to fill the empty space in my bruised heart but I can never fix it. I try to smile but there’s always emptiness lurking behind. Cuts upon cuts, upon cuts.

People try to help, they hold out their hand in attempt to hold me up. It doesn’t work. They wish to be my emotional crutches but they can’t support the weight I’m bearing on my shoulders. The guilt, the hate, the love. They don’t understand and they can’t. Nobody can understand and nobody ever will. The guilt will never pass. It will forever consume me, preventing me from achieving true happiness in my life. But in some way, knowing this brings me satisfaction �" I don’t deserve the happiness that I desire or the love that I long for. I’m a terrible person and that’s the way that it is.

And then she tells me she still loves me, and I tell her the same. We’re up until sunrise having conversations deeper than the blackness of space like we used to. The love is stronger than it was before, and we’re confused. I miss her. Her name carved into my arm reminds me of her laugh, the pure innocence on her face when she saw something cute and how every time I witnessed that I fell more and more in love with her. We don’t know how any of it will continue but it scares me. I want it to work, I want the scars to fade, and I want to feel like we’re perfect together again. And she thanks me for making her feel happy for the first time in a while, I do the same. She numbs me to everything else. She’s like morphine to my broken heart, and I can’t let her go. I can’t make the same mistakes as I did before for both our sakes.

Love hurts; you’re up nights crying for them when they’re feeling colder than the top of a freezer on your fingers mid-summer. You’re pouring every drop of your liquidated soul into making them smile; you’re opening your wounds and pouring salt on them just to disinfect other things. And it’s worth it, every sacrifice, everything you put yourself through. People say love conquers all, but it really just destroys everything in its path, and leaves nothing but rubble behind.

The scars fade; they’re replaced by more cuts. My skin hardens; I become an ugly, damaged creature. I rely on everyone; I depend on other people’s opinions of me. The opinions are ruined by how damaged I am and the attention I crave. I eat it, I eat it and it regrows all the skin I’ve lost. I start to look better on the outside �" Maybe I have a little colour in my skin. But my eyes are dark. They don’t sparkle like they used to, they show less life than the blandest of deserts. Just hot sand and venom that will dehydrate you to the point where you lose all will and just give in.

I become some sort of tragedy to the people around me. My anonymity is destroyed as I become their horrible masterpiece. They see me break down, slowly as the boulder of depression cripples me. It turns me into a pile of mush. I’m a fire and my mood is spreading through the people around me, ruining them like it did me. They must be happy, and I don’t know how to do that. If I disappeared they’d worry, or be upset. If I continue on like this, they feel bad or inadequate. I just have to pretend to be okay for them �" They deserve to smile, they deserve to laugh. If I can’t be happy, I’m going to make damn sure that everyone else is. To everyone that I’ve hurt, betrayed, lied to; I’m sorry, you deserve better and I love you all.

Three short months later, things are better. We’re in love and more than before. We have fixed everything, are happier. Life is easy for us, we feel fantastic about each other. Birthdays, Christmas, Halloween -- They’ve became happier celebrations, life’s glowing with bright yellow colours and I can finally feel like it’s worth living again.

But with every silver lining has a dark cloud, what if life repeats itself, what if we fall into the vicious carousel and are hurt over and over, what if she tells me she doesn’t love me again? I don’t know if I’m ready for us to go through that again. The cuts release the pain, the cuts translate my emotional pain to physical, where it can be understood, where people start to take it seriously, where I can almost read it. Paragraphs in the deep red ink telling me I’m worthless, that I can’t do anything right and that I’m at fault for everything. More cuts, bigger cuts, deeper cuts. More and more cuts just until I get to one last deep enough cut. And then, no more cuts.