there are sutures holding the pieces of me together. no, i don’t mean metaphorical sutures, the kind of flowery language one might use to talk about their beautiful inner shitshow; i mean my body is held together by pieces of thread going in and out of my flesh. i’ve learned to live with it; or to survive it, at least. but the thing about poorly stitched things is that they bleed sometimes, and it keeps staining my shirts; that bothers me quite a bit more than the fact they are there.
people don’t really notice it. i don’t know if they should. sometimes i think so; it is a pretty glaring defect. but it doesn’t seem to garner too much attention, so i just try to do the same.
sometimes a knot might come loose, and my guts fall out of it, and someone slips on my wet insides on the floor, and they look at me askance before shaking their shoes and moving on.
sometimes, rarely, someone might notice the sutures or the blood, and for a moment they might ask about them, ask if i’m okay; and i tell them i am, because i am still alive despite the flimsy helding-together of my self, so what else is there to say? and they move on, and i move on, and my stitches (they have become mine at this point) keep on ruining shirts.
sometimes i think of trying to get them fixed, and i have tried, but how do you even go about untying your parts and getting them glued seamlessly without rebuilding into the wrong person? it’s a stubborn fault.
most of the time, i pretend they aren’t there. i walk and talk and get close to people and ignore the way my movements feel wobbly. and even if they don’t notice them, they can still feel the blood splattering on them when we get close, so they walk away. i understand that, i’d be annoyed by it as well and i’d walk away too if they weren’t embedded in my meat.
some of them were sewn by others, some by me. i don’t remember who or what i was before them; i don’t want to remember. i don’t know what it’s like to live an unalloyed life, not anymore. i’m an amalgam of parts and thread.
sometimes (only once, actually) i meet people who see the sutures, the blood, but don’t walk away. i wonder if they understand because they have their own, or if they pity my imminent crumbling. i’m afraid of all those stained shirts making their relationship with me too costly, too heavy to be feasible on the long term. and yet, i don’t want to be fixed by them. that’s not a burden i ever want to be on someone, especially them. and if i can use all these strings to make them a life rope, i will gladly loose myself until there is nothing but a pile of disjointed things that were once a maybe-person on the floor.
these sutures have to be useful for something.
