Chapter 263 : These little Persuasions

Esmee

I couldn’t think straight after I ended the phone call with a shaking hand. I didn’t know what to do. The truth was I didn’t think about what happened to me when I was a child that much anymore. I Had done the opposite of what I told others to do and put my abuse in a million boxes and tied it up with chains and bolts but for me it had worked up until that point … Hadn’t it? I noticed that scars up my bear arms and shuddered at the thought that I might have been wrong. I could never erase the marks. They were permanent as the ones left inside of me but with my voice I could give them some meaning, with my speech I could heal  the ones that still mattered. The ones that hurt still after all the time.

I had forgiven Julie though. Made peace with the fact that she had did things to me what were not right and surly she had already paid the price that she could offer for her sins. I was still alive and she was the one dead and I had a daughter and a family… and an unnatural fear of locked toilets or wetting myself to the point of panic attacks… I was 30 years old and living in her shadow. It was years on and I was lying to my husband to keep her safe, ruining everything that I had and loved.

I roughly moved my hands over my face and tied my bed tousled hair up into a pony tail at the back of my head trying to get the itchy hair off of me face, trying to create some room in my now uncomfortably filled head for the things that I wanted to feel, to do the things I wanted to do. Emmet and I had recently decided that we wanted to start fostering again soon and I wanted to get the rooms ready as I knew as soon as our names hit the books are phone would ring off the hook with disgruntled social workers looking for emergency care but things wouldn’t budge. They needed… persuasion.

My eyes routed over to the cupboard above the sink before I could shove my body out of the room and away from the danger that I knew it had over me. My thighs still had newer scars then the rest of my body and I still remembered clearly Leo patching me up with thread. It was too soon to bow to its need again. Just slightly over two weeks, some of the marks still had partial scabs over them. If I hurt myself again I could throw the recovering title out the window and welcome myself back to the life of a current cutter. I would need to buy more dressings… and try to re-master the art of stitching myself up. I would have to lie to my daughter and to my husband. Any intimacy between Emmet and me would begin to hurt like hell. There were a hundred reasons to run for my life away from the cupboard, a hundred good reasons and only one bad one to cut… but it felt so good when the metal broke my skin… when blood found the surface and trickled warm down my arms.

I reached for the cupboard telling myself that seeing the blade would make me wake up, that I would decide not to cut but it was all a lie to try and protect myself. I had already made my choice. I only got the blades out the packet if I was going to break skin. 

Going onto my tip toes I found the familiar metal butterflies of the box with the tips of my fingers and nudged it to the front of the cupboard so I could wrap my hands around it and pull it out. I had managed to ignore the bright yellow box that was next to it or the box of dressing and tape. I defiantly tried to ignore the two suture kits. I wouldn’t need them anyway, I was a lot stronger then to get carried away…yeah right