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8-15-01 - 1:43 a.m.

I'm wearing one of those camisoles intended for skinny people with DD-sized breasts. Or at least that's what I'm assuming, because the straps do nothing but fall down to my elbows.

It used to be, as a pre-pubescent young girl, that my idea of the perfect body was one where, if I was to look straight down, I would not be able to see my stomach jutting out from under my breasts. Even when sitting. I wanted to weigh 120 pounds and be five-foot-seven.

I'm five-foot-three and weigh 105 pounds. According to this body-mass index calculator, I am underweight. My BMI is 19. Less than 20 is underweight. And to think just six months ago I was something like a 24. (25-29 is considered "mildly overweight.")

I didn't intend to write an entry about my looks. But I'm feeling down and they are, collectively, an easy target.

I have very unattractive hands. They're small and knobbly and they look like they belong on an old woman. They would be pretty on an old woman. The veins in my hands glare at me. I have a tiny piece of mechanical pencil lead in between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand where I accidentally jabbed myself in eighth grade. I should probably have it removed. It hurts when I touch it, but it's almost like a trophy. Several of my friends have little mechanical pencil lead bits in their skin. It's strange. My fingernails chip a lot. I have a few very faint scars on the ring, index, and middle fingers of my left hand from when I punched out a window in tenth grade and had to go to the hospital to have all the glass removed.

I mentioned briefly, in a past entry, that I cut my hand a few weeks ago. I didn't go into detail about it, but it has really stood out at me all day, so I feel the need to elaborate. I took the biggest kitchen knife in my parents' kitchen and dug into the skin in the palm of my right hand (right below where the index finger meets the palm) and didn't stop cutting until I had reached the opposite end of my hand. I did it slowly to make sure it would hurt for as long as I could stand it before crying out. Kellie was upstairs on the computer, says she heard me yelp. It was all I could do not to scream. I wanted to just let it bleed, let it gush all over the beautiful, two-year-old hardwood floors that served as a status symbol. But Kellie came to my "rescue." She caught me.

Sharon forced me to go to the hospital the following day. I got stitches and told him it was an accident. Every time I've ever been hurt, it has somehow been an "accident."

I'll never forget something Rob once said to me. It was in ninth grade. Even though it was nearly 100 degrees outside, I was wearing long sleeves. He demanded to know why. I reluctantly rolled up my sleeves to show him a series of dark bruises my mother had so kindly bestowed upon me. I told him I had tripped while trying to learn to stop on Rollerblades and fallen on the ground. Rob made a face and said, "How come the ground's always twice as hard for you as for anybody else? I know you aren't a klutz. You're a dancer."

My hand is going to scar. It's going to be a huge scar, from one end of my palm diagonally to the other. It still hasn't completely healed-almost, but not quite. Sharon tells me I should seek physical therapy for it, because I may have damaged a few nerves. I can make a fist. It takes some effort, but I can do it. I might go see somebody. Haley's mom is a physical therapist. I'll just go to her.

It won't get rid of the scar, however. I could probably get laser surgery, but a part of me thinks I should keep it. Just keep it as a reminder of what I shouldn't do. Ever. I very rarely self-injure. But when I do, I make it a point to do it right.

Tonight, I had a fight with Sparkler (this does go along with the original topic) and we were both being stupid and immature and throwing words back and forth at one another. At one point, she said (paraphrased because my short-term memory sucks) to me, "Next time you take a knife to somewhere, make it your neck."

I don't think so. I've only ever taken out my aggression on my hands. Because I don't like them. I think Sparkler believes I was intending to commit suicide when I cut my hand. I wasn't. I was intending to cause myself pain that would last. I wanted to make myself suffer because I felt I deserved it. If I had wanted to kill myself, I would have done it. But I don't want to kill myself. Amber's death was enough to make anyone reconsider the option of suicide. It was the ultimate wake-up call, the ultimate slap in the face, the ultimate betrayal. I thought she and I had a friendship. She was supposed to be my soulmate, the one person in whom I could confide anything without having to explain my motives. She would have been the only one to not think me crazy, because the same thoughts would have crossed her mind a million times, too. But she took the easy way out. The "easy way" hadn't worked for me. Maybe I wasn't meant to die of suicide. Maybe I'm just a lucky murder victim waiting to piss somebody off just enough. Or maybe I will grow old. But I'll still have my scars.

I have scars on other parts of my body, not just my hands. My first time ever shaving, I thought you were supposed to dig the razor deep into your skin for it to work. So on that big vein on the ankle, there is a tiny scar. I remember screaming bloody murder in the shower and dashing out, naked and dripping wet, to Anne's bathroom to get a Band-Aid. I don't shave around my ankles anymore. I wax them. I'll shave the rest of my leg, just not my ankles.

Isn't it weird? Here I am, avoiding the possibility of reliving the extreme pain I felt when I sliced my ankle, yet talking about how I practically relished the self-inflicted agony of my hand.

I have a scar on my knee from when I actually did fall onto the ground. Kellie and I played hockey in the street for a while during (I think) freshman year. We didn't have cones or nets, so we took books and backpacks and set them up as goals. She tripped me with her stick and I scraped my knee on the asphalt. That was a dirty trick, and she would have been sidelined for it at school, and I would have been awarded a penalty shot, which I would have aimed at her.

All my scars are pretty faint and people don't see them until I point them out. But I see them all the time. They all remind me of where and how I was at a certain age and a certain stage in my life. They aren't trophies. They're just symbols. They're ugly.

And to think this entry began about a tank top.

 

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