There was a time when things were different.
At that time, I wasn’t aware how life’d treat me. I was in school when I came home with my first hole. After repressing the pain while I had lunch with my family, I locked myself inside my room and bled for too long.
Then, the next day, I came home with two more holes. One on my upper thigh and the other one on my shoulder. A stinging pain sprout out of them that made my whole body, a wound.
The next day, after returning back home, I left my mother shouting and hustled towards my room while leaving a trail of blood on the white carpet. I slammed my bag on the bed and lifted my shirt in front of the mirror. Half a dozen holes were revealed that dotted my stomach and chest. It was hard, bleeding for hours that day. I needed someone to treat my wounds with gauze. Instead, they were left open. It took half the night to stem the flow of blood and I was exhausted. Excruciating pain was the price of healing.
In the morning my mom made my favorite pancakes for breakfast. I wished she’d have kissed me on the forehead instead of stuffing me with those delicious pancakes.
I returned home that day, more battered than usual, covered with holes from head to toe. I gazed inside my mother’s brown eyes, longing to see the reflection of my holes. Instead, they were filled with every other dilemma our family endured.
I locked my room that day, and stood beside the mirror with blood pit-pattering on the linoleum. The holes looked like tiny flickering tongues. A sucking wound on my back, square between my shoulder blades was hurting me the most. It was too wide, too deep and a gentle touch brought back the memory of my best friend at school. May be that’s why the wound was the worst.
I stood there for too long, dribbling blood on the surface of clean mirror and staring at my face. The taste of loneliness mixed with the sleepless night was bitter. I heard my family talking, my brothers fighting over stupid things. My mother knocked at my room’s door. She waited for an answer but silence was all she could hear while I struggled with my cries, cupping my mouth firmly with both hands. She screamed and called my dad.
I got up, wiped my eyes brutally with one hand while holding a knife in the other. After hiding it under the bed I slammed the door open. My eyes saw fierce expressions on their faces and their lips moved angrily but my ears heard nothing. A shrill sound as if a drill was making a hole in the wood echoed in my head.
After it was all over, I shook my head and locked the door, again. My steps felt heavy as I motioned towards the mirror. The two days old wounds sprang open. Blood spilled out of the crusty scabs that were peeled off.
In the morning, I left the bloodied bed sheets as they were and headed towards school with my head cast towards the ground. I came back that day with more holes but they didn’t hurt that much as they did before. Because, I made dozens of holes that mustered over my torso, to avoid pain from the ones given by others.
“Soon these holes will all turn into scars and they’d be the reminders of how tough I’m“, I thought. The light had started entering inside me, through my wounds.
I bled that day on my bed but the door was wide open. My parents passed by as I lay there, un-noticed, for they had their own monsters to fight with -and I had my own.
“She was not quite what you would call refined.
She was not quite what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.”
That was the day I promised myself, that I’ll try to fix my daughter’s holes with gauze, made with love and care. But as they say, life is what happens to you while you are busy making ‘plans’.
Every one of us has to unfold one’s own myths.
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This 695 word story is written for Speak Easy. The task this time was to use “There was a time when things were different” as the first line and to give a reference to a photo that was of parrots. I should admit that, while writing this story, my mind started wandering in my own past and when I read my story now, it seems more like my real life story than fiction. I have decided to leave it unchanged, as it reminds me of my ‘fresh’ old wounds.
This story can be an end, or a new beginning of my writing career. I am getting married this coming Friday and life had been hard on me, lately.
Meet you after my wedding ! Miss me and pray for me, Please. Love you all.
White Shadows 