You brought me to life

You brought me to life

Esmee flipped to her feet and took two steps back away from me cradling her arm to her chest while stroking her fingers down the length of the line of thorns. It looked like she wanted to run away, that nothing in the entire world would give her greater pleasure to run into the night and never see me again. She was scared, so scared I could even feel it through me.

I wished she wasn’t scared. It was strange to witness her with such intense fear. I had seen her sad before and it had broken me to witness her tears but in a way this felt worse. She was like a trapped teenager caught for the first time and bullied into explaining herself. In the blink of an she was one  of us again, the 15 foot metal fences as much as I cage for her as it was for me. She looked like she was barely in control of herself, a split second away from melting like I had done barley half an hour before.

I heard her whimper as her eyes caught mine for a split second when I got to my feet before she looked over her shoulder staring longingly at the gate. Her legs twitched in her effort to keep them still. I didn’t know what to do for the best. I could ignore the secret that I found or play dumb it but neither of them would help, it would be patronizing to us both, yet I had no words to give her of comfort. How did you comfort the person that had always been the one to sew you up before?

Slowly I walked over to her trying to keep my feet slow and in time with the beet in my head so I didn’t scare her anymore but she still flinched and made her muscles go solid as I touched the arm that she cradled like a baby to her chest. I had just wanted to hold her, to kiss the top of the bandage that like Arabella had done to mine but I didn’t want to force it away from her. Her prize had turned sour now. At the time the cut would have been a gift now she wished that she had been just a little bit stronger, a little bit wiser.

“I am scared,” Esmee whispered still not looking at me “I’m terrified of what is happening to me. I have a child, I’m pregnant and I can’t stop cutting myself. How am I meant to look after them – you, everyone else here when I can’t even stop harming myself?”

Without think about what I was going or how it would affect her I felt my body move forward and my arms wrap around her shoulders before kissing her on the cheek. I had wanted to do it since I had found out we were somehow connected by more than just nurse and patient. Arabella used to do it every night before she went to her room, she used to say it was protection against the nightmares that I had. At first I believed it wold actually stop Joe or Brain making there night time visits to my bedroom, I soon learned that in the end it just made the pain of their visits easier to live with.

“I’m sorry,” Esmee whispered.

“Don’t be, please don’t be. A few more scars on your arms won’t change who you are. You have looked after me for seven months. You brought me back to life.”

“That was luck honey. Technically, you should have survived.” I could feel the stiffness take Esmee’s body in my arms as she remembered the day she pulled me out of the bath. It was one of my biggest regrets of all. I had plotted and twisted my lies around her all day and made her believe them and then I had tried to take my life with only a passing thought if how it would get inside her head, of the scars it would leave on her soul. I couldn’t bring myself to regret the suicide attempt but I did regret doing it when I knew she was the one that was going to find me however, that wasn’t what I actually meant.

“I didn’t mean physically bring me back to life. I meant you started my heart beating again. I’m not a zombie anymore. You taught me how to cry and you taught me that crying was OK. You have made me laugh. You have made me so angry and you have made me feel like I was going to die when you stopped me from hurting myself. You got me eating, don’t get me wrong I don’t always like that but you did. You showed me that Love can conquer the world if you believe in it. You made me understand that I was abused and I have been raped and that it isn’t my fault. Don’t ever be ashamed of your cuts and scars or fear who you are because there is nothing about you I would change, and I will love you no matter what you grow into.”