Disclosure: This is a little write up that I did a few months ago. It does get into self-mutilation a bit, (cutting), so it may be a trigger for some. Other than that, it's about heartbreak and moving on. So enjoy!
The Sky and the Thumbtack
A girl stood in the shadows behind her brother's house, while clutching a thumb tack. On her arm were several, thin scratches just below her elbow. There were beads of blood collecting at their ends as the girl continued slicing in rapid succession. Her mind was thinking back minutes ago to the conversation she was having on the front porch. Her brother and his best friend were talking about the upcoming wedding. His best friend was getting married to a girl he had been seeing for quite sometime. The girl listened to them talk while her heart continued to break just beneath the surface.
She stands with a smile. "I'm going to the bathroom," she lies, heading inside the house. She grabbed the tack from the hallway wall and escaped through the back door. If she doesn't release the pain she's feeling, she will break down, and she can't break down. The girl isn't allowed to do that. Her role is to be the funny, flirtatious girl that has stood by the boy's side for all of these years. She has to be the girl that always smiles and never shows any emotion. She continues to think back on this as the tack digs into her skin.
The back door opens slowly, as the head of her brother's best friend pokes out. The girl is too obsorbed in her scratching to notice. He walks toward her slowly, planning to scare her as her back is turned. Being taller, he notices she's doing something. Before jumping at her, he sees her arm and the blood coming from it. He can see the tack in her hand and hear her rapid breathing as his eyes go wide with realization.
He panics and backs up a few steps. The sound of his foot catching the ground travels to the girl's ear, and she looks up to see him standing there. Quickly, she hides her arm and the tack behind her back. A smile comes on her face and the girl who is only allowed to smile returns. "Whatcha doin? I was going back out front in a second. You didn't have to come check on me," she beams.
He was confused. She was acting so normal, so happy, like there was nothing wrong. "Your arm," he points to her arm where the blood had begun to drip slowly. The girl looks at it with confusion, "Oh this? I must have bumped into something. Wow, it's bleeding. Well, I guess this isn't the first time something like this has happened," she laughs.
He jolts his body. 'Not the first time'? Then he remembers seeing her with similar scratches on her body before. She was always 'bumping' into something. The scratches looked like nothing more than scratches, so he would never have thought she was doing it to herself. He holds out his hand to her, "tack."
The ever-present smile fades from her face. Her eyes focus on his and she knows she's been caught. Slowly, she hands the tack over to him. She didn't even get to finish her release, and she could feel the tension rebuilding. The boy reached out and took the tack, throwing it into the abandoned lot next door. "Why did you do that?" the girl asks, running over into the other yard.
She gets on her hands and knees, searching the grass for the tack that he threw. It was the only one she had with her at her brother's house. Her fingers trembled as she willed her eyes to see better in the dark. The boy ran over and grabbed her waist, pulling her to her feet and standing her in front of himself. Thus, forcing her to abandon her search for the tack. "What do you think you're doing! Are you serious! Why would you hurt yourself like that?" he said, raising his voice as it trembled with fear and worry.
"It's the only way I can cope!" she screamed, looking at his expression. "Things feel so wrong, so out of place, and I have no chioce but to accept them! I have to do something to stop it from hurting!" The smiling girl was gone and now she was replaced by a frightened, anxious one. This was a girl he had never seen before.
"What do you mean?" he was taken aback by her new display of emotion. Still, he held her shoulders, keeping her from throwing herself back into the dirt.
"You're with her, and not me," she breathed. The tears started to well up in her eyes. "I know it sounds crazy, but for years you've always been the one I was in love with. No matter what else happened in our lives, the one thing I could always count on is that I loved you. And I always believed that one day you would come to love me."
The girl took a breath and continued as the tears spilled over. "But that day never came, and I've been waiting on it since we were kids. And the woman you're marrying isn't me." Her body trembled with sadness. The boy looked at her confused. He had thought that she held feelings for him long ago, but surely she wasn't still holding those in her heart. After all, he was getting married to another woman and he talked about it all the time around the girl.
"It's like someone looked at the sky one day," she started again. "The sky has always been blue and you know that. No matter what happens in life, you know that the sky will always be that beautiful shade of blue. But one day, out of nowhere, someone comes along and tells you the sky is green," her eyes continued to search his lost face. "You know it's blue so you don't believe them, but soon, everyone sees the sky as green. No matter what you say, they won't listen. They see the sky as green and it becomes a fact. You keep looking up at the sky trying to see it as green. You try to accept that it's not the same anymore. You try to make yourself believe it's green, like the grass, but all you can see is blue. You see the same blue that you've always seen and the sky doesn't let you believe any different. No matter how many times you look at it, no matter how many times they try to tell you, that sky is blue, not green," the girl's body shook with heartache.
"You're my sky. And I always thought you would be blue, and with me. So why are you green and with her?" she asked the boy. He just continued to look at her as though he had not understood. "You've turned my world upside down and I tried to shut off my feelings and pretend that I couldn't feel the pain of my sky turning green. But it became too much!" she shouted.
"The hurt kept getting through and I couldn't breathe. But this," she paused, looking at her arm. "This helped me breathe again. This lets me pretend the pain is from that metal point, and not from my heart. Because I can't stop the sky from turning green. I can't keep you for myself when you love another person. I'm losing my blue sky and I don't know what to do," the girl cried.
The boy had listened to all of this without saying a word. When he did speak, there was only one word that he could have said, "Sorry." He grabbed the sobbing girl and held her close. He couldn't change what had been done. He could love this girl in his arms, no matter how much he wanted to ease her pain. He loved someone else and he was ready to start a life with that other person.
Still, his heart broke for this girl in his embrace. They had been children together. They had grown and experienced life and hardship together. They had a special and rare bond, but for him, that bond was not love. He saw the girl as a sister, and he never thought once about her any differently.
He couldn't stop her heart from breaking, and he couldn't stop her from wanting an escape. But he could hold her until she cried out all of her misery. He could and he did. They spent the night in that embrace as the girl struggled to let all of her pain and heartache fly away.
The girl moved away very soon after, and when the wedding invitation arrived in the mail, she left it to sit on her refridgerator. The months before the wedding passed quickly, and although she spoke to her brother, the boy was never brought up.
The night before the wedding, the boy called the girl. It went to voicemail and he left a message. He said that he hoped to see her tomorrow, but that if she couldn't come, he would understand. As she listened to it, she had a choice to make. She could pick up a tack and let the 'always-smiling' girl return, or she could leave it lay in that grass.
She chose that latter and left the tack where it had been since that night. The wedding would have to proceed without her, and it did. She spent that day in bed and let the tears fall from her eyes once more. As she walked outside the following day, she looked up to the sky, "looks a bit green today, doesn't it?" And indeed it did.
