He Ruined Me, But I Blamed Myself

By

Bruises.

Blue bruises, littered across my body, almost as if an artist had choked on his own inadequacies and retched his worst nightmare onto an unsuspecting canvas. Blue bruises – and not a happy blue, it’s a dark stormy and rather dirty blue. Yes, dirty, that’s what it is, that’s how I feel. I wonder why bruises and the sky both are blue. Why do they both have to be blue?

They have slowly started to fade, but I can’t seem to stop wearing those damned full sleeved turtle neck sweaters. Force of habit maybe – like the way I apologize two thousand and seventy five times a day for so much as breathing too loudly or the way that I tie my hair up, because he had said that wearing them down would look prettier and attract too much attention.

I guess it is all for the better, nobody needs to see my crusty skin and weakened knees, now do they? If only I could hide my sunken dead eyes and my trembling hands too. The things that these eyes have seen – love and lies and desperation. And the hands that these hands have held, only to be clenched tightly, till it hurt my bones, but he still wouldn’t let go. Why would he?

And now I have demonized myself in every way I possibly can, convinced myself that I was the problem all along so much that I deserved whatever scraps he threw at me from time to time. That’s what we humans are taught, isn’t it? If something isn’t right, we endlessly search inside ourselves, looking to uncover some horrible monster hiding within us.

And I did exactly that.

And now, now I am broken in more ways than I can admit to myself without drinking enough alcohol to make my nerves numb. I’m nothing more than a lost soul in a sea of people who love me, but they can’t save me or fix me, they can only keep loving me with the hope that one day I will see myself the way they see me.

But until then, all I can see is blue.

Blue, everywhere.