Speckled Stars & Wrist Worms

His wrists were thin and so bright, a white that could be described as neon, if neon were a shade of white. They appeared luminescent, almost glass-like, with long dark blue branches lining the underside. Motionless, the way veins sit, but if you stared at them long enough, they seemed to almost slither. She referred to them, only in her mind of course, as his wrist worms.

Her body was marked as well, surface level only, pale splatters and blotches scattered across her warm skin. A particularly large one lay like a flower petal over the lid of her left eye, large enough that its edge grazed the bottom of her eyebrow. His own deep brown eyes grew wide at the sight of her.

Her mother once said, “I don’t understand,” while shaking her head with a disappointment so heavy it seemed irrational, “why you choose to show so much skin.” She bit her tongue, as she so often does, until her mouth filled with the strong taste of metal, stifling the urge to shout that they were, in fact, displaying equal amounts of flesh.

When they were together, he would gently kiss her eyelid as the tightness in her shoulder blades melted away. With her long fingers, she’d trace the lines on his wrist, slowly and softly, as he wondered if she could see the way his heart was fighting to escape from his chest. The quick rising and falling of the skin stretched tight over the notch in his jugular.

Her mother once said, “I am honest because I am your mother,” when she asked her why her words were so cruel. “Cruel are the friends who lie to you; they tell you only what you want to hear. It is a mother’s job to tell her child what she needs to hear.”

So for the first time, she wondered, through blurry eyes, if he secretly wished to color over her streaked and speckled skin. She mused over whether, in actuality, he was seeing blemishes instead of stars, and feared that it was a mere fantasy, an unreasonable expectation for anyone to appreciate the markings she was adorned with. Once unabashedly so, until she learned that when they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is not applicable to the one who wears said beauty. It does not matter how a person appears to themselves. How they are materialized in their own eyes is irrelevant.

With a sad mix of desperation and resentment, she layered fabric over her body and painted over her skin. A sinking feeling swallowed her when he did not say a word about it. A thick crack in her soul was formed. His silence, a confirmation that her beauty, in fact, did not lie in her authenticity.

She wanted to scream, “Love me as I am or do not love me at all!” but she feared that the standard was so unreasonable that she would be forced to sustain herself on self-love alone and she was very certain she could not bear that.

All of her mother’s words ultimately summed up to “no one will embrace you as you are, so be sure to show them who they want you to be.”

A feeling of sorrow fell over him when the blossoms that stippled her skin had disappeared. He wanted to cry out, “What have you done?” He wanted to know what had overcome her to do such a thing, to rid herself of such magic. He did not know how to ask. He was unsure how to approach a subject of such vulnerability, so he remained quiet. The question, however, continuously rested on the tip of his tongue but never left his mouth. But he still made sure to keep kissing her eyelid so that she knew he still loved what she had concealed.

Her stomach turned with each kiss he peppered on her face. Did any of him miss the part of herself she had sealed away?

There was a sickening humor, whatever higher power she was not sure she believed in, found in her situation. The more she shrouded her body, the more the stains and smudges began to form, spreading across her faster than they ever had before. Her friends were all quiet, just as she suspected them to be.

“Honey,” her mother had said one night, “your concealer is not opaque enough; I can see the shadows peering through.” Her friends, she decided, were not real friends. She imagined them snickering behind her back, mocking the splotchiness that she was. She despised their smoothness.

The rope that tethered him and her to one another began to loosen as her brain flooded with regretful realization of how he must really feel. He tried to hold on, to kiss away the shame she held, to reveal that magic she forced herself to stifle.

He was not strong enough.

She looked at him with an expression of discontent that he did not understand. He pondered what he possibly could have done. He craved to declare, “I love each and every part of you,” but he had once been told that he came off too strong. That girls did not want boys who wore their emotions on their sleeve the way he did so he sealed his lips. He did not utter a word of the passion that burned so violently inside of him.

Eventually, despite how hard he clung, the rope slipped.

One night, as she was missing him, grieving the version of him who she believed loved her raw form, she sorted through old photographs and found one she had taken of his hands holding a bouquet of daisies. Her eyes grew damp and her jaw grew heavy with emotion. There was a hollowness that replaced him that she feared she might never be rid of.

“Oh God,” her mother exclaimed as she walked by, “those veins are sickly looking.” Heat filled her ears. She loved those hands, loved to trace those wrist worms.

“I like them,” she whispered.

“Honey, don’t lie to him.”

She could not lie to him. The rope was gone.

He had let her go.