Dancing with Tears In My Eyes

The Phantom Thumb Flicker

A strange thing happened on that day. No, it's not the fact that I went to form. I know, I know it's really really weird for me to voluntarily go completely of my own accord. No bribes, no threats, no nothing. I just walked in and got on with it. I'm actually glad I went. 

I was early. Like really early. Ten minutes early. I think then, I was still too used to the timetable I had at George Eliot. It had become fused into my brain, and now I followed it on autopilot, even though things were different now I was here. Mr. Brightside was there already. I walked in and he was just there sat behind his desk. He looked comatose. I even briefly wondered if he was dead. I panicked. If he was dead, then I'd be their prime suspect because I was right here, right now. I considered leaving. I actually went to move away. I hoped that when I came back. everything would be fine.

Curiosity killed the cat.

It also got the better of me. I went up to him, calling his name. He didn't respond. His eyes were like glass. I wondered if it was a dummy, and this was his idea of a practical joke. If it was, then it was a cruel one. I kept expecting someone to jump out and yell 'surprise!' Or to spot a hidden camera, but there was nothing. 

My instincts had known something wasn't right the minute my eyes had landed on him.

He was sat behind his desk as he usually was. That didn't bother me. It was the blank eyed stare at the opposite wall, and the fact that he was rocking backwards and forwards in the chair that made the little hairs on my body stand on end. It was an eerie thing to see. It felt strange to think a teacher would be acting in that way. I regarded teachers as adults in positions of trust and of power, not in a position of strangeness and of mental abnormality. Mr. Brightside's thumb kept jerking outwards, the motion being repeated for the same duration and the same light skin brushing sound. I went over to him, and saw the tears running down his face from his blank eyes. 

*tears coat your lifeless eyes with dew...

                                                              Visions in blue,

                                                                                      Visions in blue...*

In his right hand, the hand with the weirdly jerking thumb, there was a small blade that had come from a pencil sharpener. Mr. Brightside was running his thumb across the corner of the blade, repeatedly cutting into the skin. There were quite a few little nicks in his skin, all but one of them no deeper than a paper cut. The repeated motion cut was a lot deeper, actual beads of blood on the skin surface. One of them had run down his wrist. I followed to blood trail and saw yet more self harm scars on his wrist from recent deeper cuts.

I didn't really know what to do. I knew that if another teacher or member of staff found him like this, his teaching career would be over. He would probably be sectioned. I worried about it. About him. I grabbed his thumb and took the blade out of his hand. I didn't know what to do with it, but I knew I had to hide it so I put it in the pocket of my jeans until I could dispose of it. I called his name, lightly slapping his face to get him to come out of his dissociative coma. All I could think was 'snap out of it, snap out of it!'

I remember him blinking rapidly and wiping his eyes, before looking at his thumb. I guessed it was sore. I took a clean tissue out of my pocket and dabbed at the blood there, so it would just look like he had a few paper cuts and not neat and parallel blade slices of a habitual self harmer. I even wiped the trail of blood that went over the healed scars. 

It looked as if at some point he had tried to slit his wrists and commit suicide. 

Mr. Brightside saw that I had seen, and pulled his arm away from me and rolled his jacket sleeve down over the scars. He fixed me a look that told me he was angry, lost, vulnerable and frightened at the same time. I nodded once slowly. I didn't intend to tell anyone. If I were him, I wouldn't want me to tell anyone either, so why should I do it to him? I had always been taught to treat people as I had wanted to be treated, and I wasn't going to stop following that now. 

Besides, a part of me knew it was his choice to make. 

If Mr. Brightside wanted to die or to hurt himself, I wasn't going to stop him. If I wanted to die or to hurt myself, I wouldn't want people to stop me. 

I knew he must be in great internal pain, and that anything and everything was a distraction. 

I looked into his light coloured eyes, 

'Open up my eager eyes, I'm Mr. Brightside...'

and saw a scared and lost person. I saw flaws I recognised and pain I felt every second of every minute and every minute of every single day, a pain that broke my heart and shattered my soul as if it were a mirror.

I looked into his eyes and saw myself.

My mirror image.

I don't like that. I don't like how I can see myself in him at all. It makes me feel dirty and unclean. All of the hairs on my body stand on end, and I start to shake. Sometimes, I even have to go and wash my hands. I don't know why. It just makes me feel that way. It must be one of those things. 

Anyway, after that everything just continued as it ever would. It was like a rubber band had been stretched and then snapped back to its original position. Just normal. Mr. Brightside gave us back our form essays.

The little paragraph of comments at the bottom of my own reads: "A very honest and truthful account of the task, that goes into great depth when talking about feelings towards the task. The evaluation shows that you are very perceptive towards the needs of others, and in particular take care regarding their feelings. Your own opinions are expressed strongly and often harshly in places, with only one viewpoint being focussed on. There are definite targets to be set from your responses, each with their own individual time limits, but all remain achievable." 

In Mr. Brightside's handwriting, it actually looks more like:  "Ave r Yho nest an d tru thful a c ocunt ofthe task, t hat go e sinto gr eatdep thwhen t Al kin gab out feel in gsto war dst he task..." And so on. On the essay itself, the writing is slanted at an odd angle and smudged in places. It isn't even straight, and yet the essay has been written on lined paper. Next to my neat and linear cursive script, it looks as if a five year old had written it. It seems odd to me that i am probably more of an adult in my mind than what he is. And he must be about 23 or 24. At the time this happened, I was seventeen. 

I wanted to write it down, because I can't exactly tell anyone about what happened. I could, but I'd ruin everything, and I don't want to ruin everything. I've still got the blade I took from him, and I've taped it to the bottom of my essay. It won't matter much because they won't see it. Mr. Brightside asked me to rewrite my essay, because I was too harsh towards myself. I told myself that I would do it, but I knew that the second time around would be just as harsh and blunt and critical towards myself as I ever was. I never take criticism seriously anyway. I see it more as constructive criticism. That's not really a bad thing, is it?