Chapter 235 : How to be saved

 

This time, I'll be sailing
No more bailing boats for me
I'll be out here on the sea
Just my confidence and me

And I'll be awful sometimes
Weakened to my knees
But I'll learn to get by
On the little victories

Little victories

Matt Nathanson

 

“I am not judging you. Are you crazy?” I sighed twisting around so I could look at Esmee again. “I don’t care if you are scared and you could tell me anything about you and I would not judge you for it because you are amazing. You are more than amazing but I know what it means to have these scars Esmee. I know how each one felt and I don’t just mean the metal going through your skin. It takes something screwed inside to resort to this pain. I can read every scare and I can feel every feeling that has ever gone with them.”

 

I stopped and yanked up Esmee’s sleeves before grabbing the small torch out of her pocket that she had bought with her. I directed the beam over the scars. They took me aback. They were worse than I thought they were going to be, or at the very least worse then I hoped they were going to be. They were old scars now as she had promised but they had once been bad cuts and half of them had never seen the stitches that they had so clearly needed. I had only been able to feel the worse ones through the fabric on her top but there were a lot one then that. Purple and red scars scared the already scared skin until they had made her arms unrecognizable and dead. I swallowed hard. How had they let someone so precious get like this?

 

That one there,” I said pointing to a smaller yet raised scar on the crease of her wrist. “Doesn’t look as bad as the rest of them but I bet it bleed like hell and hurt a whole lot more as it was healing then that big fat one over there.” I rested my fingers across the wide purple and blue scar that had caught my eye.  “ these kinds of scars hardly  hurt at the time because you are so numb inside you can’t even feel metal under your skin. I bet you can’t even remember it bleeding that much. Probably because the first thing you really remember about it is waking up at the hospital with an arm full of internal and external stitches and a doctor at the end of your bed… These little white ones look harmless enough compared to the others. Every human being on planet earth must own a few of these but these aren’t made in little numbers. These scares are frenzied, made in short stabbing motions with the very tip of the blade and made in bulk. A hundred of these little buggers in one go would be nothing because your mind has lost all rhyme and reason. It feels like your skin is itching on the surface and only the cutting reaches it. When I am cutting these are the ones that scare me the most, because I’m not sure I will ever be able to stop. You cover both your arms first. Tiny little beads of blood forming on the surfaces of each wound but it isn’t enough so you do your legs then your stomach until there is no more skin and you are so sore all over it feels like someone has rubbed you up and down a large cheese greater. You will need no stitches but your body is just as broken.” I tried to catch my breath before I moved the torch with a shaking hand over to a group of six perfectly neat parallel cuts that got deeper and deeper the father they got down her arm. “These cuts here… well these…” My voice broke into sob. They all had one thing in common that broke my heart into bits. She had made them all in her desperation. She had felt the pain.

 

“Mi… it’s OK, I understand,” Esmee said softly before pulling down her sleeves and taking me in close with her arms again. I expected her to feel different somehow. I expected to almost feel what she had felt run through me with just one touch. I almost thought her grip would seem weaker, or her arms would be cold and dead but she was no different. She was still warm in spite of her cracks and still strong enough to hold me up as well as herself. She may have had the arms of a cutter but her soul was rising above to become bigger than her demons.

 

“You don’t seem like a cutter, you don’t seem so week and under a spell but your arms tell me a different story.”

 “That’s because I am not a cutter. I am not BPD, anorexic or depressed. I am not EDONS or bulimic or bipolar or psychotic.”

 “So what are you then?”

 “I’m Esmee. I am about five foot on a good day and I am married to the most amazing husband who is a giant I must add. It isn’t important and it makes no difference to who I am, but I weigh about 115lbs and to anyone who thinks that makes any difference to me as a person can go to hell because my self-worth cannot be registered on a scale. I am a senior psychiatric nurse. I am a foster career.  I have a daughter called Amelia Honey Bear and four angels somewhere up there looking down on us.” Esmee stopped suddenly her face contorting slightly as her chest heaved up twice like she was about to be sick before it settled somewhat, I also knew if I was to shine the torch at her face the beams would bounce off of the tears in her eyes.

 "It’s Ok,” I whispered. “I get like that too. Every time it pops into my head, even if it’s just by mistake I get a few seconds of not knowing weather I am going to cry scream or throw up and then it subsides a little bit just leaving you slightly breathless.

 “You are too old for your years,” Esmee moaned as she came over to me and took my hand into hers. “you know feelings and have experiences things that knock grown men and woman to their knees and it isn’t fair, and neither is me telling you half a story. On most days of the year I am the woman above. I don’t care about my weight, I don’t cut myself, I don’t make myself sick and I defiantly don’t think about swallowing a bottle of pills. I function as a normal healthy happy woman in society but there are days when it feels like I can’t get out of bed, damn it there are days when I don’t get out of bed. There are days when I have no energy to put food down for the cat or even prepare a meal for my own daughter. There are times when I look in the mirror and I want to sob because I hate the person staring back at me. There are days when I don’t shower or eat or get changed and i pretty much constantly blame myself for the death of my four unborn children. I can cry a lot and when that doesn’t work I will cut myself and my own husband will have to bandage me up. I am not perfect.”

 “You are,” I butted in at an almost shout before lowering my voice, “Perfect I mean. You are everything that I want to be, even with your crap days.”

 “First things first I am not perfect but that isn’t an insult, that’s good. No one is perfect and hell I don’t want to strive for it. When I was striving for perfect I was 64lb. I wasn’t perfect. I was anorexic, I was a cutter I was bulimic and I was depressed in every sense of the word. The only thing I wasn’t was Esmee. Not perfect is good. Flaws and bad habits are what make us fucking human!” Esmee exclaimed her voice echoing around the beach and out over the sea. It sounded playful and happy even with the swearing. It was the kind of sound that Disney princess’s made when they wanted the wildlife to help them out with the laundry.

 “The world doesn’t need perfect people. It needs good people that will fight and try for what they want and what they believe in. It needs people like you, alive and well and giving something to it that only you can, but the shit thing is it won’t prove that too you. It won’t even make your life easy while you try and work out how to survive.  I wish I could save you. I wish I could promise that tomorrow will be so much better, that food won’t repulse you and you won’t want to cut but it doesn’t work like that. No matter how hard I try, I can’t save you. Emmet can’t save you, that bloody unit with all its locks and alarms and staff following you into the bathroom can’t save you. You can only save yourself. It took years for me to win one battle with self-harm. It took nights of sobbing, rocking and bending over a bucket on hands and knees while puking my guts up every few seconds.  Then guess what at the end of all of that, I mostly still cut myself anyway, but one day I didn’t, and I claimed that little victory. The first time I threw the pills away was a little victory. I went out and I bought more the day after and I ended up in A&E but no one could take away the fact that I threw the first bunch away. That’s what it’s all about Mi, in every part of recovery, the little victories, because when you shove them all together, in the end you realize it’s just a victory. You can let this kill you, or you can try. You can fight.” 

 “I’ll fight.” I whispered, somehow the strength from Esmee flowed through her and into me melting some more of the ice that was constantly blocking my veins.

 “That’s a good choice, that’s a great choice” Esmee smiled leaning over and kissing me gently on the forehead, “and Mi, this moment right here, this moment of strength even if it goes tomorrow or in a few moments, Is one of those little victories.”