Moments and Impacts

Impacts of Chasing Beauty

Impacts of Chasing Beauty

I wish so badly that I could remember. That kiss. I remember that kiss, or maybe the "remember" is the wrong word. My mind didn't remember, but my body did. It was a craving that my body wanted, still wants, while my mind wants Colston.

"Can I use the phone?" I ask Lara when she meets up with me at dinner.

We eat in the Commons, the same place that I met, would that be the right word?, Brently this afternoon. During the day they push the tables to the side walls and pull out televisions on rolling stands, the big box ones not the flat screens, and set up couches. During lunch time kids will just walk in, grab whatever it is that they're serving, and sit down on one of the couches. But onces dinner rolls around the tables are back out, ready for kids to sit down on them and eat.

Lara looks up from her clipboard. In all honesty I'm a bit surprised that she's here. She's been trying to get me to interact with the kids around me, she says that I'm being very anti-social, so she's been trying to hang back so I can't talk to her. I've been trying, don't get me wrong. I've tried to talk to Calla since that day a week ago when she threatened my teddy bears, a very homey welcome might I add, but she just won't talk back. During the day I'm usually trying to take a nap, between my injury, and the screaming I can't seem to get enough of it, and I'm usually just falling all over the place. Not usually someone people want to interact with.

"You only get a call a day," she warns, mostly because we are around other people. She's allowed me to use her phone on the rare occasion, also known as just about every day, but that's when we are in the privacy of my room, or an abandoned hallway, somewhere people can't hear us.

But lucky me, I haven't used my allotted phone call. I would usually call Dad after lunch, just to fill him in on how he's doing, and try to squeeze any information that I can out of him about the last three years, but since I ran in Brently I didn't get the chance, "I didn't use it," I say.

She looks me over, trying to gauge if I'm telling the truth. I don't exactly know why because as far as I can tell she's not exactly a lie detector. She nods, as if my body position has given her the answer that she needs and motions towards the Common's doors, "Come on then."

We walks silently to the room where they have the telephones, I'm almost relieved when we step inside and we can hear the almost silent mumblings of the kids in the separate rooms.

"Looks like they're all full," Lara states the obvious. She motions to a couple plastic chairs sitting against the wall for kids waiting, "You can sit, or you can come back after dinner. Although I don't know how much better it will be by then. It'll probably be worse, honestly."

"It's okay," I say not wanting to wait any longer than I have to, my courage will most likely be gone by then, "I can wait. I wasn't all that hungry anyways."

Sitting down in one of the chairs I let my eyes flicker from light to light that is placed over the doors. They're all red. Lara leaves, saying that she is going to go grab some dinner, and I'm all alone, at least for a little while.

I'm so immersed in watching them that I don't even notice when the seat next to me becomes occupied, "You don't seem very hurt," I look over, a little bit startled, to see a boy about my age sitting next to me.

I don't even know the boy and I want to cry for him. The left side of his face looks like it's been shoved into a bag of vicious cats hungry for blood. His ear is almost completely destroyed, I doubt he can even hear out of, his left eye is missing from it's socket and it looks like someone tried to sew it shut but did a pretty flimsy job at it.

His good eye looks me over from head to toe, and even with just one eye on me I feel the need to curl in on myself so he can't look at me anymore, "You don't look hurt at all, except for those stitches on her head."

My hand flies to the right side of my head. The stitches are long since gone, they were taken out when I was still in the hospital, but I can still feel the scar and my hair has had yet to grow in to cover it. I tried hiding it, I messed with my part a bit to try and cover it. My hair is surprisingly thick, so I thought that I did a fairly decent job at it, nobody else had said anything about it, but now I'm wondering if they were just being courteous.

"Don't give me that look," he smirks at me like he knows my darkest secrets, actually I don't even know my darkest secrets, "Everybody sees it, we all have very keen eyes you'll come to see. After you're here for awhile you get them too."

I bring my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around them, "What are you talking about?"

He grins, leaning back in his chair. His arms create a type of pillow behind his head, while his legs stretch out and cross at the ankle, "It's like a super power you get when you stay here for too long. I call the the Injury Detector, or ID for short. You start seeing everything the people try to hide, scars, bruises, cuts. Stitches."

I can't take my eyes off of his neck. It's covered in scars, much like the ones that cover the left side of his face, but this is the right side of his neck.

"I don't think I get it," I say.

His head swivels a little bit to look at me, "Look at the doorway," he makes a little moment for me to look in the direction I came in, "You see that girl? The one in the blue shirt?"

I nod, looking at the girl he's talking about. She doesn't really seemed injured, and while she is on the other side of the glass door I can see her, she can't hear us. She really isn't that far away so I would be able to see the scars or bruises if she had any.

"Looks normal, don't she?"

I nod, and look at him.

"That's because you don't have ID yet, you don't see it until it's pointed out to you. Now look at her again," he makes the same motion again and I look over at her. The next time he speaks he's deadly quiet, "Look at her wrist. Her right one, the one she's hiding behind her hand."

I focus in on her right wrist and gasp when I see it. The a vicious red mark that almost looks like bubbles on the inside of her wrist. It's in the shape of a perfect circle like somebody pressed a cigar to her skin.

"Now look right beneath her right eye, it's covered in makeup but you can just barely make it out."

I look and am more surprised at what I find there, then what I found on her wrist. I can't quite make out the word, but somebody scratched something into her skin, most likely with a knife.

"You see it don't you?" he asks, and I don't have to say anything for him to know that I do, "You'll start seeing it more and more. It's kind of like we're find our own. We try to hide it, everything that makes us stand out, but it's stupid. These scars," he motions the scars on his neck and his face, then points at my head, "these are what make us special. They are what make us stand out against the rest of the people. Because we are survivors, and that's not something that we should hide," reaching a hand up to my head, he swipes my hair away from my scar, "They are what makes us beautiful. They are what makes us stand out against the rest. They are what makes us different. We shouldn't be hiding them," he grabs my cheek and pushes my face so I'm looking at him, "we should be enhancing them, because without these scars, we wouldn't be who we are today. No matter what we went through to get them, they are our lives spread across our skin. It puts them out their for the world to see, and the world wants to see them. Not because they want to laugh at us, or because they want to gawk at us. But because they want to read out stories. They want to see us live. They want to see our beauty, because that's what everybody wants. Everybody wants to be beautiful. But they'll never succeeded it, because they aren't chasing beauty, they're chasing pretty."

***

Okay, this chapter has been done for a couple days, it's just taken me a long time to get around to it, and I'm really sorry about that. This is also a short chapter, but I couldn't think of a better place to end this chapter than here.

Give me some feedback please!

Love,

#StayingAnonymous