Bruises
[TW. violent in hindsight]
My skin was a war, pulling blood up to pools like poppies. The heat was unbearable but I didn’t mind if it meant watching him take his shirt off. He tanned easier, he glistened. I looked at him and felt like I’d never seen a man before. Something about him thick and solid, like his surface was made altogether different from my own, proven in the fact that I could not mark him. He’d laugh, mock me, and give me another bruise.
By the mid-point of June, my friends stopped cooing over it. At first, as the spring was heating up, bringing more skin out at dinner, we’d all giggle and blush at the etchings of passion spreading across me. I felt 16, gathering my friends up and bragging about my new experiences. I felt superior, like I must surely be being loved, being touched, in a grander way, a realer way – just look at all this proof. He’d leave a mark on my neck and I’d call it a love letter. I heard myself start to ask for it, a way to make it romantic when puddled finger prints were already always rained across me. If something was parting us - a holiday, something - I’d ask him to leave a note on my body. I made my eyes doe-like and asked for the ownership. The marks came to be a foundation. In a situation so murky, at least I had the purple. I had proof it was real.
The week I met him, I made a playlist - Bruises. Love songs then sad ones. How foolish was I? So far past a teenager but still believing that acts of violence can ever be acts of love.
But I laughed at the dinner table. I joked about just how bad my iron levels must be. I joked in the late mornings - laid out on my garden, skin already looking violent - I joked that he could just look at me and I’d bruise. (That was true, in its own terrifying way. The eyes of a hunter, my friends refused to hold his gaze. They said they watched him, looking at me like something to eat, pushing his fingers into the back of my neck, into theirs when I wasn’t around).
I joked that was all it took. A mere brush, a caress and I’d bloom. But by mid-June, they wouldn’t allow me that. My chest was be neon yellow - a strange and moulding state. Just visible under my skirt, my thigh was basically black. One time I bruised so strangely that the hem of my jeans imprinted onto the violet like white stitches – all that from a bite, the first time he ever took me home. I took photos, that was my first message. He told me from then on, he wanted to see every mark he left.
Here you go. Show her. Please.
I contemplated taking a picture daily. Hourly. I wanted him to see the shades change and kiss them and share in them. My body hurt, bad. My skin felt tight and weird, my muscles felt torn and bobbly. My chest would ache and ache and scream and feel smashed in if I laughed. I felt heavy and some days I felt so beautiful because all of it was from him. I was something chosen and here was the certificate.
We all come to learn these things aren’t special.
I hear of girls around town, also googling if bruises can scar. I hear of friends who stopped the laughing, averted their gaze. It was supposed to be our intimacy. A fleshy whisper of adoration. It was the way I made it okay.
Love, you’re so lucky I was mad. You’re so lucky I had ribbons in my hair, the prettiest of bras, believing myself a muse, a canvas. You’re so lucky I pouted my lips and jutted my collar bones out in the photos I took of my chest; the battle ground.
I looked at him and felt like I’d never seen a man before. Surely made of something else, only impact and never impacted. He’d force my head and squeeze me and pinch me and egg me on to bite and suck and scratch, harder, laughing that no matter what, I was too soft to last. The one time I did - leaving the tiniest red kiss on your neck - he was angry. I applied hot flannels, scrubbed it with a brush, did a cold press, repeat, repeat, all while he text an ex and I began to wonder if she was as black and blue as I was. When he told me to wear long sleeves to the show, was it because she’d be upset at the thought of us touching, or was it because she’d remember how hard a grip can be?
We all come to learn these things aren’t special.
I saw a picture of the next. On her tanned arm there is a bruise. A broken oval, a fault in the front, one crooked tooth. A bite in her skin, pulled up and purple. Marked. Put her in his jaw and carried her across a line. There is only before and after - during is fiction and tender feeling. Literally. I never knew skin could be so colourful, so repulsive, so manipulated. The hand of the artist, now terrifying and elsewhere.