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No matter how many times I tell you I'm fine, you still see right through me.

Be it the scars up and down my legs or the hate that brews within me.

Even when I say I love myself, you always hear me scoff or laugh at it like a joke.

Or perhaps you just know better.

Seeing the facts, I understand.

The dark bags that pull down on my eyes.

The scars which line my inner thighs.

And the cries you listened to weakly as you held me, as I pleaded so I may die.

You never seemed to give up.

Someday you'll draw a finish in the sand.

Enough is enough.

You'll push me away.

Claim that I cried in vein.

And I knew it-

And that point my mind had been made up.

And there was trouble.

Pushing hot lighters to my skin didn't give me any luck.

The blood soaked blades on the bathroom sink began to pile.

My mother began to chime in over the wafting smell of death.

And when she came to finally check in on me, there I sat.

Drenched in wet, the shower still running, it took her years to notice.

I'd been dead all along.

She just never had the heart to show it.

Never did she once forget to watch me after that.

Nor was it as hard, because corpses do not move.

They stay tucked under comforters away from the world.

Blocking out the sunlight.

Cutting their skin like they're making paper snowflakes dripping in moonlight.

The bodies once spoke, but as they passed they slowly became quiet until their mouths were glued shut.

And they stopped going to school.

No one there noticed.

They never had.

They never ever even realised that the dotted lines on her wrists were warning signs.

Warning signs that foreshadowed the future.

Dotted lines

- Ariah Christman

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