Impunity

Something brought into this world by violation cannot help but inherit its pain. I was born into beads, splayed across wooden floors. Little planets, scraping across organic material. Grasping for the skin that once housed them. I, too, was born with an incessant grasp. The insuperable desire—remarkable in existence—debased in reason, to have meaning. On the eve of my fondest days, I would run my fingers along the tops of wooden chairs. Break each and every fingernail, split it in half. Watch the pale pink of my organic humus spurt down my digits. I would imagine the successive damage, the ache. That ache, the feeling of cotton bandages on raw flesh and exposed nerves gave me meaning. 

When I was young, I was taught that it was of my greatest caliber to harm myself. Reckless abandon, a natural sequence to me as your blood is unto you. It ceases me, and retreats–this urge. It festers and manifests in all the parts of me hidden to even my fingers when they bunch at my skin. My skin often feels more like a fabric, changed irrevocably. Never to be the same again. 

My family never told prayers. I kept mine beneath my nightgown, in between my organs; the letters burrowing into my supple, squirmy flesh. I worried that I lost my hopes and dreams every time I bled. Every inveterate moon, a bit of love I would never get back. For against God's admonition, I am a liminality—the precipitate of Adam’s impunity.