“Can you imagine a life where you have a person who looks at your wounds and sees you for you & not you for your wreckage? Everyone knows that my body is a wound—all they have to do is come close to me & they get blood all over their own bodies. I am cut open & ripped at the seams, the illnesses I am cursed with are literally killing me. My relationships are crumbling beneath my crooked feet, I can’t keep love for long because I push onto people with my palms & leave bloodied handprints on their clothes until they can’t stand having their own flesh being turned into just as much of a crime scene as the crime scene that is my body. There was only ever the thought that someone would look past the blood, the infection, the dirt & salt in my wound/s; no more than a thought—an imagination from the brain of a child deep inside the pits of pain, desperately searching inside people’s eyes for less disdain & more empathetic gaze. I wonder if I will ever learn how to be more stitches than red gauze; if I will ever be able to stand close to someone without making them gag, making them fear the way my eyes turn empty when I think that they’re going to leave me. I am held down by these things which I have only a little control over & I am trying to learn how to accept myself so that I can allow other people to accept me as well but I can’t accept myself when no one else does but that is so unhealthy & everyone who has ever accepted me has left my life without a second glance & labeled the abandonment as “love” but how can that be? Acceptance doesn’t work when you don’t hold it in your chest for your own soul but how am I supposed to love this body when all it ever does is bleed all over everyone I have ever loved?”
— Can You Love Me Enough to See Past It?, anon prompt (han hyland)
