The Tearsmith

Disarming

There are some types of love you cannot cultivate.

They are like wild roses:

They rarely flower,

And their thorns are like tenterhooks.

I remembered her, my mom.

Her curly hair, the sweet scent of violets, and her eyes were as grey as a winter sea.

I remembered her warm hands and kindness, how she always let me hold the samples she was examining.

'Be gentle,' I remembered her whispering as she handed me a beautiful blue butterfly.

'Tenderness, Nica,' she said. 'Tenderness, always...Remember that.'

I wished I could tell her that I had held her words inside of me, that they were the foundation upon which I had built my heart.

I wished I could tell her that I'd always remembered, even when the warmth of her hands had disappeared and mine were covered in Band-Aids, the only colour left in my life.

Even when my nightmares were tainted by the sound of creaking leather.

But in that moment...I just wanted to tell Mom that sometimes tenderness wasn't enough.

That not all people were butterflies, and that no matter how gentle I was, they'd never let themselves be handled with care. That I would always be covered in bites and scratches, that I would end up covered in wounds I was incapable of healing.

This was the truth.

In the darkness of my room, I felt like a forgotten doll. My gaze unseeing, my arms hugging my knees.

My phone screen lit up again, but I didn't get up to reply. I already knew what it would say, and I didn't dare to read any more. Lionel's messages were an unending sequence of accusations:

Look what he did to me

I told him to stop

He started it

It's his fault

He punched me for no reason

I'd already seen it happen too many times. I no longer had the strength to question whether it was true.

Deep down, this was how Rigel had always been.

Violent and cruel, that was how Peter had described him. It didn't matter how hard I tried to write him into the pages of this new reality: he would never fit there.

He would always crush me, defeat me. Day after day, I would end up losing more pieces of myself.

I wished that Anna and Norman had never gone away, that Anna was here, telling me that nothing was beyond repair.

This would have happened anyway, I thought to myself. Whether they'd stayed or not...it would have fallen apart, sooner or later.

I sighed heavily, swallowed and noticed I was very thirsty.

I decided to get up. I had been there for hours and night had fallen.

Before leaving my room, I made sure there was no one on the landing. Bumping into Rigel was the last thing I wanted.

I moved through the darkness. It was no longer raining, and the moonlight shining through the clouds and illuminating the shapes of the buildings outside allowed me to find my way.

Downstairs was immersed in shadows. I stumbled into something in the kitchen and almost fell over. I gasped, grabbed onto the wall and stared at the floor, blinking.