Skinny Love

I let my fingers do my talking. I scan my eyes over the canvas, watching the pencil dig deep into the paper, drawing out the delicate features of Lucy.

I always caught myself drawing her and each time I looked at each portrait, she seemed to get smaller and her eyes were like rocks, hard and dense.

They say your body is a temple. I never found comfort in my own skin until the day Lucy saw me for the first time. The insecurities that I held as a child vanished and became air that blew away the second she kissed my bare shoulders and showed me her own true skin. I am stronger now, than I was before and I don’t look like the boy who grew up in New Jersey, hiding behind the shadows of everyone else.

She is self-destructing. She knows it. She knows that I know it too. But yet her fingers always find her gag reflex and her bones jag at her skin. I want to help. I want to show her the beauty she can unfold if she just stops and takes everything in for a second.

Those green eyes that I had fallen in love with are fading away and I hate her for that. I hate the way she knows what she was doing but yet she lets it go on and linger, like a ticking time bomb.

Mikey always laughed when he saw us together, snickering under his breath about how I would crush her when we would sleep together. Ray asked if she weighed as much as a baby. But Frank understood, at least I thought he did. He would listen to my rants about how her eyes were cold and her tiny fingers couldn’t hold onto anything even if my hand was tied to hers. He would sigh and speak with words of possibilities but they never seemed to correspond or fit with her.

“That’s a lovely picture of Lucy Gerard,” my art teacher Mrs. Sweet speaks, smiling down at my work.
I look up and smile back. “Thank you.”

She walks away while I stare at the girl behind the picture.

Why won’t you let me help you Lucy? You’re losing yourself.

Once the bell rings, I grab my things and scan the hallways, looking for the familiar face.

I catch her by the water fountain, leaning against the wall with her eyes closed.

I rush over to her, gently place my hands on her arms and ask, “Do you want to go?”

I already know the drill. Her body is wearing itself out, eating away whatever she doesn’t let go in her stomach and she’s exhausted. I entwine our fingers and we walk out through the side exit of the school.

No one notices and no one cares. Teenagers ditching school is as subdued as gang fights in New Jersey.

We head to my car and sit there for a few seconds, wondering where we could go.

“What about your room?” She asks, her voice quiet but cutting the silence.

I nod, realizing both of my parents are at work and the house is empty and waiting to be creak with our footsteps.

My street is empty. Husbands and wives busy at work while the children are crammed in school, filling up their minds with countless information they’ll barely remember by the time they hit puberty.

She steps inside after me, looking around as if it’s her first time, but we both know she knows this place inside and out.

We walk to my bedroom where it’s dark and I fumble for the light. As soon as the light bulb bursts electricity into the room, her eye scan my walls and her fingers trace along everything in her way.

“You drew a new one?” She asks, pointing towards the finished comic on my wall.

“Mhm,” I look over at it and smile, the drawings of the both of us sprawled out on paper with no dialogue. Just pictures and the emotions I put in while creating it.

There are thousands of pictures clinging to my walls. Pictures of comic book superheroes I stood in awe of as a kid, pictures of Mikey and I as kids but the pictures I drew of Lucy and I are the most personal on my walls.

She hates the flash of cameras and how your face can be recorded on film, showing you how you really look to a stranger. I notice the way she looks at herself in any mirror we pass by. Like a surge of hatred and disappointment rushes through her when she catches her own eyes looking back at her.

I could only let the pencil show her how she really looked. And from my drawings, she never turns away and never lets her eyes drag over it with no emotion. It was like an eye opener, like she was close to something.

I sit on the corner of my bed and pat the space next to me, waiting for her to sit.

Her weight is nothing against the mattress, it barely sinks under her and I can’t help but frown.

Her fingertips fly up to my cheek and she begins tracing patterns only she knows against my skin.

I close my eyes and lean into her hand, taking in one of the few moments where she comes out of her shell to show that she cares, even if she doesn’t admit it.

I open my eyes and see her staring into mine, her hand still cupped against my cheek.

I grab her hand gently and speak up, “I wish I could paint the solar system on the back of your hands.”

She mumbles a small, “Why.”

“So that when you’re completely lost, you see point B. And point B will always be me.”

Her hand falls and she looks down at her lap. I wrap my arms around her waist and pull her down with me, resting her head against my chest.

She is so small against me that I feel like I’m holding air; Air that smells like peppermint shampoo and cherry Chap Stick.

But I can hear the heaviness of her heart with every beat. It is still but loud enough to vibrate all the way through her rib cage.

I’ve got the words I want to say stuck in my throat, the syllables on the tip of my tongue but my lips are shut and my voice keeps quiet.

Instead I hum the tune to her song and I sing softly in her ear, “Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly. A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.”

Her body is put at ease and soon I feel her go limp in my arms, sleep letting her body rest for a few hours.

“Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over your head. Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she's gone.”

Where have you gone Lucy?

It was her eyes that caught my attention when I first saw her. They were green with specks of yellow and I fell into their pool. She was small back then but her skin still had a glow I couldn’t look away from. I kissed her faster than I expected and back then she wouldn’t turn away if she saw it coming. She would press her lips against mine for a split second and I tasted the heaviness of her heart, letting it sink into my skin.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on. She is as lovely as the winter solstice and her scent is enough to send me into a frenzy of love and lust mixed together.

Love is between us, even If neither of us speaks the words.