You may
"We cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them."
-Shane Koyczan
And as a young boy my twelve-year old sister looked me in the eye away from the ear of our parents and spoke so I listened, and I felt every word so sweet I could almost taste them. She told me that if I ever saw someone with scars to be extra kind to them, even if the scars weren’t on their body. And four year old me took that and remembered, so it’s stuck with me in the back of mind to the sixteen year old boy I became, and even today at 20 years old, so much so that when I turned seven and the first kid pushed a girl a year below me to the floor, which I had never seen before and yet she seemed so used to it, I helped her up even if it meant falling to the bottom of the stack of popularity at school and I asked her if I could hug her, to which she replied
"you may".
And as we went through to secondary school I remembered that she smelled like strawberries which was sometimes stolen by a foul scent that I later found out was cigarette smoke from her step-father. And as I got to know that scent as it fused into my fingertips and became my only source of air, she told me she loved me, because that was what her mother grew to love and every girl will grow into their mother as much as every boy will grow to marry theirs because that’s what they see as ‘love’, that’s what they see as ‘normal’.
And with every bruise that appeared on that girl’s body I would kiss each one because my sister told me that would heal them, and every line that grew into that girl’s skin -so much so that she was lined by them at fourteen- reminded me so much of the sister that left me. And as I touched each line before making love to the first girl I’d ever made love to, as I understood each carve and each blade that she’d grown into, so tightly wrapped into the skin that it cut because inside her head was worse than outside in her home, I lost my virginity to that girl, but her’s had been stolen by such filth that he dared to call himself her ‘dad’, as if he would ever be more to her than the man that stole her mother’s smile after her dad died. She told me those familiar words- “it didn’t count,” but as she spoke the words she couldn’t look at me. And I kissed the scars that laced every inch of her body because that was what my sister had taught me away from our parents, but I couldn’t look her in the eyes as my sister had because I didn’t know what my sister’s scars had meant until much after she had killed herself when she turned sixteen, and I hadn’t known that those ‘secret lines’ that only I’d known about would one day kill her because her smile had also been stolen by the man who robbed her of her virginity, even if she told me “it didn’t count,” and the first time I kissed that girl, the first time I asked if it would be okay to love her she’d merely whisper “you may”. Needless to say I fell in love with her.
And I understood as I turned sixteen that if those secret lines hadn’t have been so secret then my sister might still be alive, and yet I would’ve betrayed her trust if I said anything, so nothing would’ve helped. And similarly if I’d have told anyone besides myself about those lighter lines that became deeper of this girl that meant more and more to me, if my sister had been around to tell then maybe, just maybe I could have stopped at least one of those lines from permanently tracing her skin, and maybe if she didn’t remind me so much of my sister I would still have been able to look her in the eyes as her sixteenth birthday approached, I wouldn’t have broken up with her a week before and she wouldn’t have hung herself on the morning of her sixteenth birthday, which would’ve made her ‘legal’ in her step-father’s eyes. And at the funeral I wanted to scream at her mother for not taking her away from him, and I wanted to scream at myself for not saving her and I wanted to kill her step-father.
But after a while, those same lines began to crawl down my arms, yet before I let them take over me I gave that man a shovel to the back of his head to which the court gave me ‘sympathetic bail’ and the man was in a coma for six weeks before I realised I didn’t want to be the reason for another taken life.
So I left that melancholy fucking town and I volunteered and I don’t give a damn if you think blasphemy is for those who lack vocabulary, that placeruined me. And as I moved to the new countryside and I married a girl who was extra kind to me with more smiles than scars but scars nonetheless, because that was what I was taught was a call for help and I needed for once in my life to be a saviour. And as I kissed that girls scars at the alter in front of our broken families and smiled into her eyes of which despair enthused with hope, and I asked her not if she’d marry me but if she would allow me to marry her to which she replied "you may," and we gazed at the sunset and watched the clouds line the sky in a good way, she promised me she’d never do it again.
Although she took up smoking soon after that, and her arms turned a different colour than before. She told me she liked spots over stripes, and that was the night that I killed myself.
