Pulling Weeds

TW: mention of eating disorders, depression, self-harm and suicide.

To feel like a stranger in your own home. Out of place, a Barbie among china dolls. Replaceable. When those bitter, nonsensical childhood memories begin to make sense. The epiphany that it is not a case of love, but fragility. Some require more glue to be held together than others.

That time when you sang and she sang too, and you tittered in your unbroken voice a complaint about her stealing your spotlight. They dismissed you. Yet when you sang along with her, they rushed to her side, defending her because they must have realised what road she was on. A journey you shortened, by feet and by miles. But how could one blame you, that child whose view of the world was so narrow, a crack in a glazed window? Not even she knew, not then and not for a long time after. Maybe it hadn’t even been bad then, maybe not. When you travel through the gardens, you do not see the seeds below the earth, tucked away in the soil. No, you see the bright flowers that distract you from the weeds beginning to grow. But to call it a weed does not do it justice, for it is not so easily plucked and cast away.

If it was a weed, then she would stop crying in the train station bathroom when you beg her to. All the promises you make about how she is a child, not a Vogue model, would convince her she does not need to feel guilt when she lifts the fork to her mouth. When they tease her at school, she would not return in tears, eyes puffy and cheeks crimson as if she had been settled into the emotion for a long while. With a crooked grin on her face, she would not turn to you and whisper: I am happy. It feels weird. Because it is not a strange sensation, why would it be?

If it was as easily tamed as a weed, you would not look for scars every time her wrist is exposed. Your skin would not crawl every time you pass her room in the hallway and realise the door is shut. You would not burst in and have to blurt out some excuse about why you are here in her room, interrupting her when she is sitting cross-legged watching some show you made fun of earlier. There would not be an overwhelming urge to apologise profusely and chase after her every time you slightly insult her, and she would not seem to take it personally. Because she can handle it, she is not made of glass. There is not the risk that she will shatter with any backhanded comment. No hesitation to follow up on your call to dinner, because there is the surety that comes with knowing she is just distracted, and she is not somehow gone. Her emotions, her life does not feel as fragile as a baby bird, one that you have been carrying in her hands since the day it was born, trying desperately to provide shelter. What a wonderful reality, where you have two feet on concrete and not eggshells.

They would not panic every time you mutter something bitter. Every time you display distress they would not fear you have set your feet upon the same path she has travelled. Guilt would not settle upon you like a shroud when you are pacing in your closet, filled with agitation about the party you are attending. More than anything, that party and its alcohol would actually make you forget about it. About her.

You would not be sitting in a circle with your friends, drinking tequila and listening to their stories about their own scars, faded from their thighs. Their laughs would not cling onto so much hardship, their self-deprecating jokes would not carry so much weight. Their eyes would not be laced with fury at a world which had scorned them, for what is there to scorn?

Why should children feel so stifled? Thirteen…fourteen…fifteen…too young to be reflecting on the world’s cruelties and injustices. Taken to young, they would say as they dab their eyes with white tissues and pray over a gravestone marked: a child’s dreams. Death, in a sense of the ending of a soul. Yes, fine! You win! Poison our hearts and our minds and bury them alongside your own. So you suppose you should not be so alarmed when you see these things in her. Really, it is not surprising. You did not give her that push, do not fear. Then again, it is so easy to pin everything on that all-consuming abstract society. So you make your return to feeling guilty! But that is suffocating so now you return to your fantasy land. Where were you? Ah, yes…

To her it would not seem everlasting, it would be an aching that claws at your throat and neck, choking you and snarling it will drag you under. Because it is so much harder for her, isn’t it? That’s why this story is not about you, it’s about her struggles. That’s why the movies follow that kid, the one that ticks all the boxes of how someone who has what she has should appear. ‘Loved ones’ are just that: loved ones. The ones that get the call, the ones that rush to the hospital in tears and nearly crash their car on the way over. Drop everything, it happened, that storm on the horizon finally came to pass. Rush through the halls with your hands trembling and your throat sore from choking out sob after sob. In the aftermath, of course. Afterglow made of pale luminescence beaming into bleary eyes.

An apology is an order for all the ‘would not’s, although sometimes it is nice to dream. For that is a fantasy world, filled with immature musings that are disassociated from reality. A magical realm, just as tangible as unicorns and dragons. A world where ‘you’ is not interchangeable with ‘I’.