10:15 p.m. - 09/26/02
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I want bandages. I want black paint in thick layers on my skin. I want to peer out from behind my spectacles at people who do not understand. I guess I'd rather be a freak than feel like a leper. I don't think it's weird really. That I have this urge to hide my skin is certainly not strange, considering how I feel about my looks, myself in general (when doing poorly.) And the bandages aren't really about declaring I have wounds- to anyone other than myself. The bandages are about taking care of the wounds. I like tight fabric that isn't the sign a clothing item is too small. I like tights and socks and gloves. If I could, I'd build myself several new skins, and I would wear them underneath my clothes. I would be a runaway, moving inward, and no one would have to come find me. I think if I went far enough into myself, I could be extroverted. But I'd have to feel a significant fortress surrounded me first.
I don't know if that's worth it. But I still want it. Smooth paint, oil-black skin and bandages dripping incongruous color. Earlier this week, it was easy. I had new glasses; in the mirror they caught my eye. I didn't look like the girl who was sick a year ago, and my focus wasn't drawn to the crappy skin and the body that isn't anything to anyone but me. The glasses are familiar to the girl I want to be, and I started to see myself as her, earlier this week. Now. I want masks and guises and advertisements. I want scars that are added to skin, not taken from it. Drawn with paint in colors I can't find. I'll make myself a new skin; I'll be completely impenetrable, my virus completely exposed. And eventually the right people will stop noticing it, stop caring even, and I'll just be able to sit with them and talk about why I need this. Why I want to seem alien when I'm so tired of feeling that way.
Oh and steel wire eyelashes at least three inches long. It's funny, though; I don't want it to draw attention. I want it to establish what I am, but not to force any judgment, sympathetic or malicious- from the people who then know. I just want to be able to walk around without having to be conscious of it when everyone else isn't. And it doesn't even feel like shame to say all this, even though thinking of my body as it is still feels like shame. Maybe it's not a badness I'm trying to advertise; maybe it's just another way to say, still here, still not perfect or ready to be, still struggling, still sick, still sadly in need of you.
Body paint isn't so bad as starvation, is it? I don't want to think this way. I don't want to feel this way, look this way, be this...alone. Maybe I want draw scars, maybe I'll draw attention, gentle attention. Maybe I want him to sit as close to me as possible; maybe I want friends to rally around. To say, hey, you don't have to self-destruct to be our top priority. To say, hey, girl, we love you and we'll be your hospital.
Bed is a better place for tears.
chord
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