Beneath the Wave

All I ever wanted

I used to cut my wrists.

Not often, just a few times.

And yet, my doctor still called it a habit.

I learned in November that no one could truly understand what the inside of my head looked like. They couldn't see the graveyards of the people I had left behind, they couldn't see the ghosts that lingered, and they didn't see me running, turning blocks, praying that tonight I would escape the monsters.

But the worst part wasn't that they couldn't see, no. The worst was that they couldn't hear. I screamed, so loudly. I screamed until my throat felt raw, until my hands were trembling, until tears streaked down my cheeks. The screams only ever echoed inside of my head, but the side effects were real.

I cut my wrists. I did it for several reasons, one being that it made the screaming sound less like murder and more like the whimpering of an injured dog. I also did it for attention. People have always made comments about cutting, about people who show them off like battle scars, as if they could ever truly understand the pain a person went through to receive them. As if they wanted to see those scars everyday and relive the pain that made them.

I cut my wrists, because the only thing I had ever wanted was to be understood. The massacre I lived in had forced my mind into overdrive and bleeding was the only way it felt real. The only way anyone would believe me that a group of villains were unleashed upon my mind and were tearing up the streets like the Joker on a saturday night.

Depression

Anxiety

OCD

Those were their names. They waved them like banners in the sky, proudly asserting themselves as the beasts to destroy a human being. And I cut my wrists, because though there names haunted me, everyone else treated them inferior. As if they weren't monsters but mere figments of my imagination, and I screamed and cried because they didn't understand; they hadn't seen what they could do.

I had.

But everyone ignored the carnage. Looked at my glass eyes and called me tired. Looked at my sweatpants and called me lazy. Looked at the grease in my hair and called it disgusting. They could not see the signs of a broken person, so I had to make it clear to them.

What was more clear, than blood?

I cut my wrists, because I was drowning. And they would toss me life rafts, not comprehending the fact that I had already swallowed water. They didn't know that they needed to swim into the water, and pull me ashore. They didn't know that I could only live if they breathed life back into my lungs.

Everyone will toss you a life raft, but no one will swim into the water to save you. No one will bring you back to life.

They didn't have to fight the monsters. They didn't even have to know their names. I just needed them to hold my hand, and cry with me.

Maybe, that was all I ever wanted.