Bruises

"Bruises fascinate me, they way they are seem to exist in their own universe, streched somewhere between my vital organs and my top layer of skin.They're like their own dry, desolate purple brown continents in the sea of my skin. 

Sometimes bruises spring up like fresh daisies. I'm taking a shower and I see them there in their new glory, being rinsed under the streaming riveluts of water. These always surprise me, because I'd like to know where my pain comes from. But i suppose they aren't that painful, though, if I didn't feel them when they happened.

Other ones I remember, remember them from the early the early day of when they were newborns, pink packages just blooming. It's because of a mistake I made, a wrong word I said, or a disinterested look I showed. The sound always occured to me first, the dull smack that barely even left an echo. And then the pain, sharp and incessant at first and then the throbbing that seeps into my very bones. I looked down at my arms, at the purple blue mass above my elbow. He had asked about dinner as I reached into the cabinet. I didn't answer quick enough. The door of the cabinet was  wooden blur. And then there was the one on my cheek, alreayd aged and yellowing around the edges. This bruise was an old man, a remmant of a swift punch delivered with a heavy fist.

And then there are the ones I give myself, in the fits of rage, when hot tears are spilling down my chheks. I'll hit my head, my arms, anything. I just don't like the feel of it all. I just want to beat the me out of me. 

Just now, I had looked in the mirror. I saw the bruises, the young and old. My eyes seemed to bulge out of my head, outside of my sunken eyelids. And I couldn't stand, so I smashed my face into the mirror. It was different and more pleasing that being hit. Something peacefull in the echoing cracks of the shattered mirror. 

It's so easy to drown yourself in bruises and blood"

All the time I have these monologues, these little tidbits of scenes appearing in my head. I can never quite capture them and I can never quite tell them where they came from. A lot of times, I don't know what stories they're from, a lot of the times they become stories. I'd like to imagine my head like this, like this massive expanse of characters and stories begging and searching for a way out. They are squirming little things, some of them beautiful, some of them scary. And they are itching to escape. And so I write about them. I think they're really what it's like to be a writer. And if makes me seem insane, the way I describe it. But it's also the way I feel. 

Fin.

-Keshia