Care For Me Not, I'll Hurt You Too Much

“Don’t hurt yourself.” He said.

You’re sure your expression was a mixture of shock and confusion. You didn’t take your eyes away from his face, asking a million questions all at once and waiting for an immediate explanation.

He gave none as his expression continued to go unchanged. You were too curious to even begin to feel embarrassed, holding his stare for a few good minutes before his seriousness began to ebb away. You stared right at him, asking him the only question that was reeling through your mind at that moment. What the hell is he talking about?

Why would he ask you not to do something like that? You had no reason to hurt yourself. Granted everyone around you seemed to get a pained expression on their face every now and then, but you would never purposefully try and harm your own body. Hell, you had enough bruises and scars hidden underneath your shirts to show that you didn’t need to be hurt anymore, even by yourself.

You wondered why he asked as the time seemed to wear on and on with no visual or verbal response from him. You held his eyes, trying to display all your confusion in yours by just staring at him. But he didn’t seem to know what it was either as you sat there unchanged, and he began to glance around the room nervously.

His serious expression began to slowly fade away as you sat there, still curious. He began to look confused as well, and you wondered if he had even meant to say that.

But what could he mean by that? He looked a little frustrated and probably shocked as he finally turned his entire face away from yours, leaving you hopelessly confused. You see the embarrassment redden his cheeks a little and that just makes you all the more confused as he keeps his face turned away from yours. You wonder what it was that he said, or that you did that caused all of this, finally beginning to actually think about his statement clearly.

He doesn’t want you to hurt yourself. Well that was already done. You weren’t the one that was hurting you. It was everyone else around you that was hurting you…mainly your father though. He left the most visible marks of your pain, all the others seemed to be mentally and socially. Even people that didn’t know they were doing it were hurting you. Every time they walked by without a glance or a care hurt you and scarred you mentally. Three years ago when you started high school, you slightly hoped that you could find another friend. But with all the damage your father was doing, you shrunk away from everyone that tried to even be nice to you at first. In just under a month, you were labeled as a basket case that no one should bother or touch, otherwise fear contracting some horrendously deadly disease through the skin. That scarred you socially.

As for mentally…well, the list was way too long for you to even begin to think about any of it now.

Physical scars seemed as if they would always be there. But self-inflicted ones? Why should you even try to hurt yourself, when you know that you have all these other people surrounding you that are willing to do it for you? You would only be adding insult to injury if you hurt yourself in the way that it sounded he meant.

You knew that people that hurt themselves used it as something to take them away from their life. It was their escape from their problems. You figured that the cutting or the wrist-bashing were used because they caused pain. Whenever someone experiences pain, then their mind sort of shuts down for a while and wanders just so that they won’t have to think about what it was that hurt them. Except their pain was mental, and they probably used the physical pain just to counter it.

As for you, you had experienced enough pain in the past several years that you didn’t even need to be hurt in order for you to shut your mind down. That was what your “autopilot” was. It was your way of escaping something that you didn’t particularly want to consciously worry about. Your mind wandered off at will, and if there was any type of physical force used on you, your mind would automatically shut down just out of habit. There was nothing you did to try and stop it, only because it helped. As soon as you would start to feel pain, you would turn…dead, just to free your mind from the pain your body was going through.

But with cutting, it was just the opposite. All the pain was in your head, and you would just cut or hurt yourself in some way shape or form to relieve your mind of the pain it’s going through. As if alternating the blows and balancing your pain out to prevent you from going insane. But with cutting, you’d be left with a scar. That one thing would serve as an unglamorous reminder of what it was that you did. Then eventually it all would lead you back to why you did it, then you would start thinking about it again and nothing would be solved. It was all just a never ending cycle of pain that would be dealt with in different ways.

Your scars and bruises weren’t done by your own will, but they still served their purpose of being ugly reminders of your own suffering.

You realized you were still looking at him, but probably with a blank stare instead of a confused one as your mind wandered about unsupervised. You’re snapped back to your situation and utter confusion as you spot him glance at you once. His eyes had left wherever it was that they were previously stationed to flash up at you. It was very brief, but the fact that it was actually at caught your attention. You knew it was at you, because he had kept his head down and turned away. In order for him to look at you, then he would have had to raise his head up. That was exactly what he had done for the brief moment, only to glance at your…stomach?

You weren’t too sure why, but you were sure that his eyes had flashed up from where they were to look at your…stomach…or lap. You wondered briefly if there was something wrong with your stomach that caused him to look over at it. Just the fact that whatever was wrong with it caused him to turn up and look made you feel as if there was something sickly and green crawling out from beneath your shirt.

You look down to check and make sure, but gasp at the sight now before you.

Is that why?

A long, still healing scar stood out prominently against the skin of your arm and you wonder how it had gotten there. It wasn’t until you remembered your struggle with your father that you now realized why it was even there in the first place, being temporarily forgotten.

The scabbing dark red and pink line ran all the way from your wrist down to near your elbow. The scar was thick, and the way it looked, it looked as if someone had taken a knife to it instead of it being pulled harshly down the side of a cracked coffee table. You had long since removed the large splinter protruding from it, and the smaller scratches healed over into small, barely noticeable patches of pink, leaving only this one large and long scar. The bruises however, they seemed to outline and practically advertise the existence of a scar on your arm.

Bruises.

You studied your own damage more than you had ever done before. All of them, every single one looked as if you had done them yourself. The placement of them was perfect for someone (Gerard) to think that they had been put there knowingly. The bruises were all in just the right spots so that it looked like you had been smashing your wrists against the kitchen counter, instead of having them smashed against random items of furniture in your struggles.

It all looked like you were hurting yourself.

You didn’t know what else to do but panic. You suddenly felt as if all the walls were closing in on you as your chest grew tight. You didn’t let him hear you as your harsh breathing came out through your parched lips. You could actually hear your heart beating rapidly deep in your chest. You felt utterly exposed and a shiver ran up your spine. Your shirt collar felt too tight and you tugged on it, trying to relieve this sudden strangling sensation you felt around your throat. Your shirt felt tight and the feeling of exposure grew worse. You didn’t have your sweater, and you were tempted to grab the comforter off his bed and cover yourself with it. You didn’t like this feeling at all.

You tried to bury your arm underneath one of your many layers of shirts in a vain attempt to hide the scars and bruises lining both of your arms. You clutched them tightly to your stomach and tried to curl into yourself, just to hide yourself from what felt like his burning gaze. Goosebumps appeared along your arms, they felt as if they stung where the scars were, and burned like a hot iron to your skin wherever the bruises tainted your flesh.

A small cold drop of your own tears on your flushed, warm skin stunned you and caused you to jump a little bit. Gerard jumped too, everything being silent and still for the past several agonizing minutes. You couldn’t look at him though. You looked around at everything but him. But still, out of the corner of your eye you could actually see him move away from you. You felt the mattress move as he shifted further away. He was shrinking away from you and not looking at you. He was turning away and shifting…like he was ashamed of you.

You felt even worse than before, but still you had no clue what it was that you could do about any of it. You couldn’t leave, he had your sweater tumbling away in the dryer, and it felt as if the past thirty minutes that it had been in there were passing by oh-so-slowly. How long did those things take?!

You blinked away the tears dripping down your cheeks, and held back the rest.

So this is what it was now? You thought to yourself. You, sitting a pathetic mess on his bed, while he ignores you and looks away…ashamed.

What did you have to do in order for just one person to think of you as something other than a sad excuse for a human being? Why is it, that no matter what you tried to do, or even did in the simplest form, they always saw you as utterly incompetent and useless? You hated that. You hated feeling this exposed and you hated most of all that you couldn’t do anything about it.

You took a deep breath and looked down at your arms. Your own hands were shaking so much, and the tears felt as if they were coming back. You tried to cover your own scars. You tried to move your hands just so that you could cover up the worst of what your father had done to you. Your fingers ran over the lines, feeling all the grooves of the inflamed skin. They ghosted over your bruises, touching them lightly and using the softest pressure that sent a sting straight to your nerves.

You shuddered again at the feelings. You shook at the knowledge that he thought even less of you. You hated it all. You felt cold inside, and a lone tear dripped down your cheek as you remembered the way he moved further away, just to be farther from an ugly mess like you.

You hated all of it and just wanted to leave again, but the simple fact that your only sweater was held hostage in the metal contraption downstairs was enough to keep you in place. Your heart sank, making your chest feel empty as you lowered your eyes to your “self-inflicted” injuries and held back the tears slowly filling them.

He was ashamed of you.

And you would be of yourself. Even though you knew the real story, you still felt ashamed and broken. Just because of the way he treated you, and because of the reason you knew he kept you around for. You felt ashamed of yourself.

The dryer buzzes loudly downstairs, signaling for your departure.