The following content contains triggering content such as self harming. Viewer discretion is advised.
/ Audrey Tan hasn't got everything. Everyone else did. At 16, she's disfigured after an incident in school. Now, she has to try her best to cope w...
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The doctor tells me I'm underweight.
I'm not. The height and weight was done at school, with 40 students staring at you standing up against a wall, feet together, head held high, shoulders upright — and your height gets announced to the world, and then your weight is announced to everyone so now everyone knows how much you weighed.
I was normal weight. Normal.
Normal.
But of course, as Dr Marten looks across the clipboard, her brows furrowing together in confusion, and worry like two hairy caterpillars, inching together; I begin to question her mental well-being. Did she really just tell me off about my weight?
"What did you say?" I ask, rubbing the thin hospital blanket between my fingers. They are rough, coarse - almost like sandpaper. I couldn't even begin to fathom how I could sleep in such a terrible bed. I think I got used to it, like how if you do the same things, again and again, repeating the process then it feels normal.
Sleeping in this bed is normal now.
Dr Marten looks up, her lips pursed into a thin line. Her eyes are trained on the IV bag attached to the back of my bed. It might possibly be filled with something else, maybe a salt solution, or morphine. Maybe that is the reason why my whole body feeling stringy and tangy, almost elastic. A strange wording. I feel like a brand new rubber band that's been stretched to the limit of almost breaking, but in a sort of pleasant way.
"Oh, no, darling." She smiles, I notice the strange way her eyebrows drifted apart. Caterpillars moving away from one another. Like the eyebrows of Emillia Clarke, that girl acting in Games of Thrones, wasn't that her name? I've never seen someone with eyebrows like that before in real life. Cool.
"But," she glances through the thick stack of white paper in her hands again, her glasses now dropping to the edge of her nose. She pushes it up to with her pinky finger, then bites her lips and walks over to my IV bag in silence.
She turns the white knob at the top invisible pipe of my bag and I notice that her fingernails were deep into her nail bed. Did she bite her nails? I glance down at my own fingers subconsciously, and peel at the tiny, remaining flecks and specks of blue nail polish I had on illegally in school. It slid away from its own adhesion on my nail, and the fleck of blue paint hung loosely on my thumb.
"I'm just going to increase your dosage..." She mumbles, then clicks her pen against her thumb and scribble fast across the paper. She turns to me, her lips once again stretches into a smile - a tight one, at best. A grimace, at its worst.
An awkward silence stands between the two of us.
"So," I say, finally, letting out a breath I did not know I was holding. Marten stills, as if she knew what my next question was even before I asked.
"When can I take off the bandage?" She doesn't even bother to turn and look at me. Her features wavers for a moment, and her eyes blinks, as if she was having a silent debate in between herself; Would it be wise to tell the girl? Would it be heartless to not?
Internally I think, her mind is screaming: Do I tell her that she'll be disfigured no matter what? Do I tell this young girl who's only 15 that her face is just a vile piece of flesh? And that no amount of plastic surgery can fix her face?
"Soon." She forces the words out. I imagine her spitting the words out letter by letter.
S O O N.
I swallow, a dry feeling tackled to the back of my throat. "When?"
"What?" She sounds as though she was gasping as if she did not expect me to ask the question again. Always so stubborn, Audrey.
"When will I be able to see my face?" It is my turn to spit out the words, like a piece of gum that has been in your mouth for too long, and it becomes almost an intolerable feeling. Marten doesn't look surprised at my outburst, she must be at least slightly worried that I hadn't shown signs of PTSD. Here I am - a 16-year-old girl, getting ready to go to junior college, preparing to sit for my major national examination, so that I could get a job (I've always wanted to work at Sephora, as one of the make-up artist there. Guess not.) Now my face is ruined, and parts of my upper body covered with third-degree burns.
"When you're halfway recovered, Audrey." She replies, "There's still 3 months to go."
