:: Broken Skin ::

I watched with fascination as the nurse deftly slit the syringe into my vein. Clench, release, clench―and then my blood, dark with life, swirled into the plastic vial with clinical speed. I remember G with sudden clarity, her words as stark as the stench of medicine in the little examination room:

'So much blood in the first cut. The razor just slit across my skin. There was a numbing tingle; and then there was blood.'

Life and its prodigious turns have a way of shrugging us off the edge of reason. G―she's a beautiful girl, with marble-bright skin and the shy, hesitant smile of a dreamer. She plays the piano and the violin with voracious talent, and she carries her fraility about her like a fallen Nordic angel, lost in our tropical reality.

But her wings have been clipped by a broken marriage―he was abusive, and they were divorced a month before her 22nd birthday. And his abuse became hers. She drew a strange, odious satisfaction everytime she drew her own blood. Her left wrist and her thighs are covered with a network of pencil slim scars, a spider-web of crimsom histories.

I held her in my arms and we cried together the first time she showed me her self-infliction.
I dried her tears the second time, and made her promise she will never bring another rusty blade to her skin again.
I had to stop the hard edge of anger the third time I found the blade-scars snake themselves over her arm, her inner wrist, the gentle slope of flesh of her thigh.

'See somebody, please,' I pleaded once. This was my childhood playmate. This was the girl who built fairy-dusted dreams while giving Ken and Barbie their dream wedding. This was the G, my G, who wanted to play her own wedding march.

But her wings are clipped; the wedding march has become her death-song. I'm not Superman, I don't have my cape, and my familiarity as a friend cannot catch her fall from the fallacy of love. I had to watch her plunge, and see the light of hope extinguish like a reedy flint in her eyes.

She's with a married man now. She's 23, and he's 32. She's got scars, and he's got kids. She's got a past, and he's got a future. She's got a dream, and he's got a wife.

'And every time I think of him, with her, with the children―I think of his lips on hers, not mine―I slide a little deeper, just to see if that pain can possibly be deeper than the hole I put myself in.'

'All done,' said the nurse, pulling me out of my reverie. She snapped on a plaster over the neat little incision where my blood has been drawn, and the alcohol-sting of the antiseptic wipe lingered on like the image of my broken friend.

If only there could be an emotional blood bank where we could go to for transfusions each time we bleed ourselves dry. Then perhaps we never need to split our skin open for the sobriety of life again.