One for sorrow

*Sensitive content: indirect references to self-harm*

When you stare into the centre of a flame for just long enough, the surrounding world will begin to fade. Darkness sets in, enveloping one’s periphery until all that it left is the flickering orange-yellow of warmth.

And that warmth is comforting. Any warmth is. But everyone knows that if you get too warm, you burn. And burns leave scars. Both visible and invisible.

Everyone also knows that the invisible scars are the ones that hurt the most. The body does not have a way of mending those invisible scars, so the task of healing is left up to the mind.

But any invisible scar, no matter where it is, also scars the mind. So, before the mind can heal the soul, or spirit, or heart, it must first heal itself.

And just as if you had been tasked with stitching back together your own skin, or performing surgery on your own organs, it can’t be done perfectly. There will be complications during the healing - infections, scar tissue, too-tight skin from crooked stitching. So, when the mind has to heal itself, it never heals quite right.

And just like everyone knows that burns leave scars, that invisible scars hurt the most, everyone knows that when the mind doesn’t heal quite right, it changes people.

I consider myself a part of ‘everyone’. I have witnessed it, from where I remain perched, day after day, watching my Mistress do nothing except simply exist.

My Mistress is one of those few people who have been unfortunate enough to have had to heal her own mind more times than one might care to count.

When you observe, you also absorb. You absorb most things - knowledge, emotions, anything and everything that could enter the mind does.

To apply a numerical value to the amount of things I have absorbed from my Mistress during my time with her would be almost impossible, I feel. Not because there are too many to count, but because there is a strong possibility that I have absorbed things and not been aware of my absorption of such thing.

But of the many things I am aware that I have absorbed, I have been able to piece together enough information to somewhat understand why my Mistress has had to heal herself so many times. For you see, I only entered her life towards what I can only describe as the end of it. Although she has not passed yet, the way she exists but does not live gives me a rough indication of how long she has left, and the number of things I have absorbed somewhat tell me how long she had been living before I came to her.

From what I know, my Mistress’s early life is as follows:

Her mother did not love her. The fruits of a passionate night with a man whose name I have not absorbed led to my Mistress’s unwanted birth. Raised in hatred for the first few years of her life, my Mistress was only three when her mother abandoned her, and my Mistress was left in the care of who I can only describe as a kind woman.

The kind woman was my Mistress’s neighbour. She had three children of her own but somehow found it in her shallow wallet and cramped home to accept and raise my Mistress until the kind woman’s children grew up and moved out and the kind woman passed peacefully.

My Mistress stepped out into the world on her own, with no family nor money, no experiences nor proper understanding of the disadvantage she had been given upon being born into a type of life where she was not loved by her own blood.

For in the world she lived in, your family and blood had the power to determine your whole life. Everything was dependent on who you knew and who knew you. If you couldn’t be recognised by your family name, you couldn’t be recognised at all.

My Mistress’s isolation and invisible scars weren’t all due to her mother and childhood. Between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, from what I have absorbed, my Mistress met a man. She loved him, and he loved her. But in an age where power and wealth were displayed through luxuries and the size of those luxuries, an adventure on a presumably unsinkable ship could not have ended any way except for bad.

From what I have absorbed, my Mistress thinks that was the first significant invisible scar she ever received. But just as I have absorbed things without knowing I have absorbed them, I think my Mistress had many more invisible scars that she didn’t know she had gotten.

Then she had been ‘discovered’. If her name had not been recognisable before, it was about to be. Her dark hair and dark features became increasingly striking as she continued to mature and one day they caught the eye of a woman. This woman was to be wed to a famous director or films and plays. The woman decided my Mistress was perfect for a role in one of her fiancé’s upcoming films. The fiancé agreed with his own, and my Mistress fast became a wonder on both the screen and the stage.

I haven’t been able to absorb completely the reason as to why she stopped being so loved by so many. What I have absorbed, however, tells me that the director began to love her more than he loved his new wife but because my Mistress was less powerful, less important than the director it was she who was shunned from the world of stardom and forced into a life where I would eventually become her only companion.

That part of her past haunts my Mistress. Posters of her face, newspaper clippings and other merchandise that now held a foreboding air are mounted on the wall. I have always wondered why she didn’t tear them down. Some dying longing in her shattered heart must force her to keep a grip on the lone string connecting her to a time where she was wanted and known.

Along with her invisible scars, after the ordeal with the director, my Mistress gained some visible scars. They came from herself, thin slices along her arms caused by actions with a knife. Those actions were fueled by a dark hatred that festered and grew inside of my Mistress and could only escape through shallow tears in the tapestry that was her skin.

She could never go deep enough to entirely free herself from the chains grounding her to this earth. My Mistress would only harm herself enough so that she could dull the pain, if only for a moment. I think, just like how she kept the posters from her time in the spotlight, there was always something preventing her from leaving this world.

After she was forced to take her final bow, my Mistress moved into the apartment she currently lives in. I was starving, barely strong enough to move when she moved in. She found me huddled outside on the window ledge at the beginning of a particularly biting winter. Like her, I have not had a mother for most of my life. Unlike her, my mother had passed rather than abandoned me. So had my father. I had no way to fend for myself and after almost three days of not eating, the tiny morsels of bread my Mistress had given to me out of the goodness of her heart were the catalyst for a bond that that solidified into a relationship that has now lasted for almost ten years.

My Mistress has not been outside in a very long time. She talks to no one, the only exceptions being herself and I. Each time her cracked lips part to speak, her voice comes out raspy and heavy. Heavy with a life of hardship, heavy with the invisible scars.

When my Mistress speaks to me, I often find her words are cryptic and somewhat philosophic. Her words are sometimes recounts of her life, sometimes expression of self-hatred, sometimes they make no sense at all. A time I had thought she was making no sense but then realised that it meant everything, was a short rhyme she recited to me the day she first invited me into her home.

“One for sorrow,

two for mirth,

three for a wedding,

four for a birth,

five for silver,

six for gold,

seven for a secret, not to be told;

eight for heaven,

nine for hell,

and ten for the devil’s own sell.”

It came from a book, I soon absorbed. The book was called "Counting Crows and Other Rhymes". At first it meant nothing. Then, when a murder of nine remained perched outside her window, my Mistress shrieked "nine for hell!" and scared them off. It was then that I realised, the rhyme was designed to predict one's future. Nine crows meant hell. Six meant gold. Four meant there would be a birth. And one, like the one lone crow in my Mistress's apartment, meant sorrow.

Not only was I a companion, but I was also a symbol of my Mistress's sorrow. The absorption of that led me to understand also why at time my Mistress would stroke me in what could have been a loving way and whispered, "one for sorrow".

The voice is one of the only three ways that invisible scars can be shown to the world. You can also see them in another's eyes. I heard my Mistress once say, "the eyes are the windows to the soul". When you look into the eyes of someone so broken and scarred inside, someone whose soul has had to be healed time and time again, their eyes will be forever melancholy. Round and depressed and grey, each time I look into my Mistress's eyes I can see the invisible scars.

The last way is less of a way to show the world, and more of a way of telling the world. When a person, like my Mistress, shuts themselves away from everyone and everything, for no apparent reason, people know. People know that you are not happy, that there is something inside you that won't let you be happy or content. People know that you have too many invisible scars.

I am afraid my Mistress is dying. Not only does she not go outside anymore, but I cannot recall the last time she spoke or ate or drank. She is a shell, forever sitting by the hearth, only moving to throw a new log on the dying embers. The logs are delivered by my Mistress's landlord, but they do not speak to one another.

My Mistress has also been long forgotten by the outside world. Gone are the looks that made her famous, replaced by lines of age and worn from the weight of her invisible scars. She has no place left in this world.

But I will not leave her, even when she passes. I will perch on her grave and weep for her. She gave me a home, as depressed and sad as it may have been. And I gave her an obscure form of comfort.

But until she passes and is finally relieved of the pain from her invisible scars, she will continue to stare into those flames, warm but not burnt. And I will sit here, as a single crow, as an aberrant symbol of her permanent sorrow.