Writing love on her arms

It was 2 o'clock in the morning. 

I had spent my night wading through the treacherous realms of my Anthropology textbook. Darwin. Speciation. With my brain fried and my body's cry for sleep making me delusional, I knew I needed a break. Despite the essays I still had to write and the French I needed to study, I put my head down to recover. It would only be for a couple minutes, I told myself.

 I immediately drifted to sleep on the computer keyboard.

And then I heard a furious buzzing, making me jump from my chair and rub my eyes. After curiously staring  at the face of my digital clock, I picked up my phone. 

Unknown number. February 9th, 2:15 am.

It was The Text. The one that opened my eyes to someone else's pain, someone else's story. 

It was a plea for help, and I was physically sick. 

"Hey girl, it's me. I really just want it all to end. I can't take it anymore. I can't."

Her name is Joy, 17-years-old and in an emotional ditch--struggling to break to the surface of her despair. It's a dance I know well. The tumultuous sashay of high school drama and the casual decay of naiveté that follows, performed in tandem with swaying adolescent hips and the screams of an alcoholic parent who cares too little, too late. 

I don't know how or why this Missouri girl got my number, but I felt compelled to talk back. She was trying to reach a friend from back home in the Woodlands; our numbers were crossed in some silly limbo of fate. I listened for hours as she trusted me, a stranger, with a tale of scandal in the family, emotional abandonment by her parents, and a move from Texas that accelerated her life into collapse. 

She opened the floodgates of her pain and engulfed me in a dark world, twisted, oppressive, and mature beyond my comprehension-- it's a reflection of a life I would fear to endure as lonely as she. 

It's a living hell, and it puts my heart on the verge of shattering.

Addicted to drugs. Drunk on weekends. She's trying to be a normal teenager, playing soccer and volleyball on her school's varsity team, while playing "mom" to five young, neglected siblings. Dealing with a cheating boyfriend. A dad who never calls. A mom who is never around. 

Feeling nothing. 

With a world spiraling inexorably out of control, she traces the veins on her arms with knives and paperclips, defining her anguish with rows of crimson. When the streams heal, the scars endure-- a written history all her own, carved into flesh.

It's so she can feel something, control something, she said. But this time, she told me, she wanted to die.

I'm getting a glimpse of a different life, yet surprisingly bound to my own. Shards of my own past run parallel to her own, but her hurts swept her in a different direction, towards other outlets for her pain. 

It's been a few weeks, and we still talk from time to time. Since that night of tears and unleashed fears, I have been haunted by another's phantasmagoria. Perhaps just listening to her was enough, perhaps that's all she needed to convince herself there was something worth living for. 

She told me no more drugs, no more cutting, no more alcohol--she wants to change. But I know it will be hard for her to do it alone.

I'm still growing, I'm still praying. And I'm realizing how insignificant my own demons really are.