Only a Child Wanting Someone to Care

She was only a child, scarcely five years old. She shouldn’t have had to suffer through these kinds of things, not alone anyway. But I guess being with someone else wouldn’t have helped much, either.

She was a beautiful girl, black hair curling around her face, cascading down her back, giving her the appearance of a dark cherub. Her eyes were pitch black, but her smile could light up any room. Until that day, anyway. Until the day a man walked into her room and walked out with something she could never replace. She tried though, tried everything she knew to fill that empty space. Trying to make herself whole and beautiful again. She ate and ate, trying desperately to fill the hollow within herself. But she gained so much weight she hated herself, she hated food.

By the time she turned nine, she was on a self-imposed diet. She started out by restricting her desserts and ended up eating nothing at all. Exercising late into the night she tried to burn off calories she hadn’t ingested. Then she would go on binging sprees and I suppose that’s how she managed to survive. Of course, no one could see her thin frame through all her layers of clothes. No one could see her protruding bones and emancipated body. No one could see anything at all.

When things got too chaotic or the memories of that night too frequent, she withdrew a razor from her pocket and drew it across her wrist, one time, two times, as many as needed to rid herself of those thoughts. On any given day one could find at least 10 fresh cuts on her arm. ‘Fresh’ meaning within the last twenty-four hours. And on some days she had as many as thirty.

Had one looked at her, truly looked at her, without all her layers of protective clothing, they would have known she was in trouble. But no one saw her like that; no one wanted to, they preferred to think nothing was wrong. No one knew or cared that she was in so much danger.

How could they when at school she did more than succeed? Every paper was marked with a hundred percent. But only the papers she did in class ever got handed in. If she had to take it home, it was never completed. The teacher would sometimes wonder about this, but rarely gave it a second thought, as she had more troubled students than the one quiet, well-behaved girl in the back of her room. No one thinks that someone who is desperate for your help could possibly be such a good student. They get overlooked, simply because it is so easy to do so.

The other students avoided her, but, as she saw it, it was easier to be alone. She knew she wouldn’t tell anybody anything if she had no friends. But she longed for company sometimes, ached so bad that she would cry late at night after everyone had gone to sleep. She just wanted someone who cared.

On her tenth birthday, after her mother came home drunk, she started cutting; deep slash marks that ran with blood. And she really couldn’t stop. They got deeper and deeper covering her arms and legs, chest and stomach. When she finally stopped, it was because she could no longer hold the razor. It dropped to the blood-soaked carpet, splashing blood onto her already crimson legs. She held her wrists away from her body, unafraid as she watched the blood spill onto the ground. And when Death came to take her away, she smiled and spun into Her arms, free at last.