I Fell in Love with Hope - Lancali

There is another scar just adjacent, younger than its predecessor.
She bares them to me as if bearing secrets.
“I was so happy as a kid,” she says. “They don’t understand how all
of the sudden things changed. Although it wasn’t sudden really, it
was more like the older I grew, the clearer my vision became. My
imagination thinned like fog, and the world I saw was so gray in
comparison.” The touch at the column of her throat falls to the
bandages around her forearms. She trembles, but I think she trusts
me enough to undo them. Beneath, little white scars form lines like a
ladder up her arm.
“It started with loneliness,” she says. “I could eat and not taste a
thing, cry and not feel sad, sleep and still feel tired. I didn’t like what I
used to like or want what I used to want. I thinned until I felt like a
blur. A little piece of the background no one would notice had gone
missing. And even if I’d never felt emptier, every time I tried to get
out of bed, I felt like I was sinking. I’d stare at my clock and watch it
tick, wishing I could break it.” She closes her hand around the cuts. It
looks like she wants to cry but doesn’t remember how.
“Thank god you all hate time too, Sam. I’ve been wishing it dead for
as long as I can remember.”
She’s still a teenager. Teenagers aren’t as malleable as children.
They have a sense of self, aspiration, dreams. Sometimes, parents
feel threatened by that autonomy. They cling to the idea of their
child, the idea of who they are.
Anything off-script feels like disobedience. So when that child would
rather read and write than follow in his father’s footsteps, violence
ensues. When that child is trapped in her own mind, her mother and
father negate the pain as nothing but a symptom of age.
“Hamlet was always my worst influence,” Hikari whispers, the breath
ghostlike.