The balls of yarn twirled around our legs, swimming in an ocean of skin and bruises. I raised my eyebrow at her as she brought out fabrics and a sewing machine. With a loud thud, she let the box of fabrics drop at her feet and she hauled the machine on a wobbly old wooden table.
"What are these for?" I tossed a ball of yarn at her and watched it slip out of her fingertips. A chuckle pushed itself past my lips and silence then dug a hole in the ground, where it buried the chuckle along with the rest. It had been a long time since I had laughed.
"You are going to make a quilt; each with patches of your flaws that you find absolutely obscure and terrible, flaws that you will never tell anyone else because you find them absolutely horrible. You find them disgusting, pathetic, and if anyone knew about them, they would consider you a monster. I want you to stitch a symbol of those flaws onto these fabrics, which we will put together to build up a quilt of beauty because everyone, including a person with bruises and scars, is beautiful." She threw the yarn of ball back at me and a smile pursed on her lips.
"Scars and bruises are beautiful?" I questioned as I twirled a strand of yarn around my finger.
"No," she paused as if she need to recollect her thoughts from the skies, spread apart like broken constellations, "they are not beautiful. They remind you of the sadness a person has to go through, even if they don't deserve it. It reminds you of the inner thoughts that swim in their minds. It reminds you that they have felt a pain which no one else shared with them. It reminds them of how alone they are, how hopeless and irreparably broken they can be. Except scars heal and so can people and those pieces that made them broken can be stitched up and put away. Just like this quilt."
"Why put away something you've worked so hard to make?"
"Because then those flaws will go along with them; you'd see that you've consumed a whole blanket of your flaws and that you should no longer find them as faults and instead, find them as treasures locked up in a treasure chest."
YOU ARE READING
therapy
Short Story"they told us that we needed therapy, as if medication and tainted words could fix broken toys."
