Who I Was – A Glimpse into Siby’s Past

My life is a series of bad choices.

I lived a very sheltered life, and I think I still do, a little bit. But you can only keep a bird in a cage for so long before it begins to sing, and sing I did.

I pranced around with a taste for stirring up drama and an even bigger taste for self-destruction. I was irrational, and childish, and so very immature. Too immature to know how to deal with things like a divorce you knew was coming yet were not prepared for at all when your dad finally packed up his bags and left one last time or even those bullies that tease you for being a slut when you’ve never had sex with anyone, or a brother that calls you an attention whore for wearing scars on your wrists the way girls wore bracelets.

Oh wait, that comes later.

I stopped believing in relationships, and people, and worst of all, I stopped believing in myself.

I was the writer that no longer wrote, the girl who lost her words and her poetry and her stories, so many stories, who worked endlessly on that novel she swore she’d finish soon but never finished because she stopped believing in the possibility that her life would amount to anything.

Seventh grade. I was in seventh grade when I decided I didn’t want to try anymore. And that is just the saddest thing. But that wasn’t enough. No. It wasn’t enough that I’d given up on everything I loved doing. I was hurting, and it felt as if the universe had collectively decided to single me out of the billions. Why? Well I don’t fucking know! My heart was hurting, I was the one that needed the physical release to counteract the emotional blows that just kept coming one right after the other.

I took a blunt box cutter and dug it into my skin. The feeling was strange and scary and painful but I just kept doing it until I couldn’t remember what it was that hurt me so much in the first place to make me do this. The scars lined up in perfect parallel lines across the inside of my wrists. They were so beautiful, a little masterpiece carved into my skin. I carved words to remind me how fucked up everything had become, so that I could look at it in case I forgot. As if I would forget.

This continued for years, and it only got worse.

And it wasn’t as if this was a big secret that I kept from the people that were hurting me. My father saw the scars. My brother saw the scars. Was it such a ridiculous thing to wonder if your child needed help? “You’re sick,” he said. “If you don’t tell me what’s wrong with you, there’s nothing I can do.” But how do you explain to someone that you needed to hurt yourself in order to remind yourself that you still can hurt as some sort of sick, twisted way of maintaining that you have some form of control over your life?

So I told him, “I don’t know.” And we never talked about it again.

School just didn’t mean the same thing to me that it did in previous years. Where it used to be a daily escape from my overbearing family, now it became a suffocating jail that I needed to be away from. I didn’t stop going- I just picked the classes I wanted to go to and the ones I didn’t. The great part about being on a 180 year old campus is the amount of space that no one uses, and the hidden passageways that are used by a whole different crowd of people. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to skip morning classes and light up on the roof of the main CCNY building, or walk into philosophy class high out of my mind on a daily basis for half a year. It made my life more interesting, and the only proof of my indulgences could be found in the form of a stench easily covered by perfume before I got home.

And maybe I shouldn’t have been alone with him that morning when we were sitting on the eighth floor staircase. Maybe then my memories of that day wouldn’t involve the haunting image of a ripe, precious cherry splattered across the steps of an old staircase that no one ever used. And maybe, when he told me he didn’t want a relationship, I would’ve not cared because it would just mean that my two year crush on this guy was a one way street and nothing more. But it meant more to me.

And it wasn’t enough. I was not satisfied, I needed to become a person that was less than a person because that was the way he made me feel. I wanted to not exist, to fold into myself and disappear forever. All of a sudden my healed wrists were craving a kiss from the cold steel that it developed a passionate relationship with over the years, the likes of which I had never known and had no idea how to counter.

Across the street, down the road. Across the street, down the road.

The biggest mistake I almost made still sits in the middle of my wrist, a tiny reminder that I am alive I am alive I am alive and that I never should’ve wanted to be any other way. I became afraid of myself, and I never let myself be alone because I knew that I would fall into the same self-destructive tendencies. I let myself have friends, though this was something my mother never wanted for me. I let myself become attached to other people, never minding how afraid I was that they would leave the way everyone always left. I let myself believe that I could be more than a person, and what a treacherous thing it was to have such a thought. And maybe I’m not completely normal, maybe I laugh a little too loud and make jokes that aren’t really funny and have trouble having conversations with other people because I never really had any proper social development (thanks, mom!) but I’m still learning. And I am still Siby, a fucked up, neurotic, insecure version of the person I might’ve been, but still Siby. Nice to meet you. Let’s be friends.