lavender soap and sins

CW: This story contains mention of self-harm, suicide, and religious trauma.

I am clothed in lavender soap and sins.

Little soap-suds dot my shoulders and settle on my arms. When I step out of the stinging shower-stream, the droplets stick to my body like resin.

My skin is puckered and pale from the bandages. Angry red lines creep up the inside of my arms, aching in the fine spray of the shower.

Outside, I can hear humming. It sounds bright orange, like a sticky sweet popsicle melting in a child's fist, dripping into a pool. That orange hum echoes through the door, into the bathroom. It slips into the shower and coats me in its perky, quick melody.

Charlie.

I could recognize Charlie from anywhere. The silhouette of her horrible posture, the scent of her hair after she washed it with that clean-smelling shampoo, especially in the way she hums. Her lips are always pressed around the feeling of round notes and unspoken lyrics.

She lives in a state of constant fullness. Good or bad. For as long as I’ve known her, she has been (and always will be) made of extremes. She eats every bite of food like it is her last or she starves herself, she throws herself into the pool naked or refuses to even dip her toes in. She lives solely in black and white.

She is humming now, spinning around the kitchen as she makes me food. It is my first day back in our home, and she wants me to feel welcome.

I tilt my head up and let the water run down my neck, imagining it burning through my paper-thin flesh and slipping down my throat like warm, thick spit. Then, slowly, I reach out. My fingers are bone thin, and the knuckles pressing out of my skin turn white as I clench the knob on the shower and twist.

It sputters off with a wet gasp, and I hear Charlie’s footsteps pause. She has stopped dancing through the kitchen to listen to the change in the bathroom.

While she listens, I stare in the mirror.

My body stares back.

I think sometimes, I forget my body is real. It’s like when you say a word over and over until it loses its meaning. I don’t mind the shape of my body. I mind what’s on it. Little tree roots spread across my arms, torso, legs, raised off my skin.

For a moment, only the sound of Charlie’s humming is in the air. Her little song is shattered by a timid word.

“Eva?”

Eva. Eva. Eva.

Evaline.

That was the name written on my hospital band. That was the name the church used. Evaline.

Charlie only calls me Eva. She knows I hate my name.

"Eva... are you okay in there?"

I do not have the words to answer her yet. They have all left me, carved out of my wrists with a kitchen knife.

There is the soft breeze of her feet against the hardwood floor, her humming almost silent now. I hear the quiet click of the doorknob before she opens the door a crack, just wide enough to peer through.

For a split second, her humming stops. Her breath pauses, sucked back into her lungs.

“Love,” she whispers.

Her fingers are deft as they push the door open, inch by inch. She watches me the whole time, eyes tracking my naked body. Searching for some protest.

She takes a long time to reach me, her humming has settled into a single note – stretching the air between us. She takes a towel in her hands, fingers stretching over the scratchy fabric. She cloaks the towel over my back, carefully drying the last bits of the shower from my stiff body.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs.

Her fingers trail over my spine, tracing each vertebrae like it’s scripture. Deft fingers following the slight curve of my back as she tenderly hands me clothes.

“You’re alright. It’s all gonna be alright.”

You’realrightalrightalright.

The word rolls around my mouth like a marble. I can taste it, how it would feel to let it leave my lips. She presses a gentle kiss to my head.

“I love you,” she whispers. “You know that?”

That marble that tasted like alright is suddenly very large. It’s stuck in my throat and alright tastes like salt stinging my eyes. She repeats those three words over and over. I love you. I love you. I love you.

She washes me in the word. It slips through my skin and burns my tongue.

She holds me as a sob finally escapes my shaking lips.

“I love you,” she whispers again, quiet tears in her own eyes. She holds me tightly as we sit on the ground.

Why won’t she stop saying that?

That word burns between us. Those four letters ache. They fill my chest and burn my palms. It is a mark burned onto my forehead and every time she says it my hands feel like holy water and I am drinking wine in a chapel. I am on my knees drawing god with crayons. I am a girl staring at another girls lips waiting for a burning forever and I am a sinnersinnersinner-

Dr. Kayla told me that these moments are called spirals.

I am spiraling.

Charlie holds me as I cry, and she kisses my head and pushes away my hair. She never asks me to talk. She knows that it will take me a long time to talk again.

“It’ll be alright. You’re gonna be okay,” she’s careful not to touch the fresh scars on my wrists. “It’ll be alright.”

Those are the only words she has for me.

It’ll be alright. You’re gonna be okay.

It’s the lullaby I fall asleep to. Laying in Charlie’s arms, smelling soup in the kitchen.

It’ll (never) be alright.

I will (never) be okay.

---

I wake up in our bed.

Charlie is on the phone. Her voice slips from her like honey, sweet and sticky as it coats our room. She is talking to the doctors.

“She tried to kill herself. She isn’t okay-”

I frown, watching through half open eyelids as her face crumples in frustration. She waits for the doctor to answer her.

“It’s bullshit! She isn’t talking again, doctor. I don’t give a fuck if you decided she is no longer a risk to herself and others. If I find her in the bathroom again because you let her go too early-”

The sun is sneaking through the window, it is falling on her face in little squares. It turns her pale blue eyes the color of shattered ice. I want to trace my fingers around her eyes and-

(sinner)

I swallow the thought.

Sorry.

Charlie lets out a frustrated laugh and then hangs up, pressing her head to the top of her phone. She squeezes her eyes closed and clenches her fist. Her humming starts again. Some indie song I almost recognize.

I make a sound in my throat, shifting in the bed to push my covers off. I am dressed in a short sleeve band-shirt that is horribly oversized. It flinches away from my body, the fabric slipping around as I try to sit up.

“Eva, Eva you’re awake.”

She hesitates, her humming going soft as she sways back and forth. Her fingers are careful as she frees me from the rest of the blanket.

I stare at her, mouth closed firmly.

“Do you want to eat?”

We are perfectly silent. She knows that this is how I function. When the world grows too loud, I begin to speak in silences. Her beautiful (sin) eyes are sad.

She takes my arm tenderly, guiding me from our little room into the small kitchen. The soup is no longer there. The night has died, and the sun stumbles across our floors like a child. She sits me down at the table and moves herself to the stove.

In an old little pot in she pours oats and water. As the water boils she pulls her hair back. Her fingers glide through the strands like they are made of water, wrapping the hair in a dark elastic band.

The next thing she reaches for is a banana. She peels it quickly and finds a plastic knife in the old mason jar on our counter. She must have taken the real ones.

Her fingers are nimble and smooth as she slices the banana into little circles. Before I can stop myself I am imagining those fingers weaving through my hair — how it feels to be hers (a sinner).

She cuts the banana and pushes it to the side. She turns the knife to soft, old strawberries and makes neat little cubes out of the sticky fruit.

When the fruit is cut and the oats are soft she spoons them into little terracotta bowls we made together last Christmas. She adds butter and sugar the color of wet sand and stirs fruit in the oats. She slides the bowl in front of me and I am momentarily frozen.

At this moment, I feel like a child. I am stuck in the days when I am seven and sickly and my father is stroking my hair while my mother makes me a bowl of ice cream.

I swallow the tears that want to leak from my eyes and fill my mouth with oats, avoiding Charlie’s gaze.

I am almost finished when she finally speaks.

“We have to address this sometime,” she stares at me. “I know you’re not talking right now, and that’s okay – but we need to figure this out eventually. You know that, right?”

I look down and pull my knees to my chest.

Sorrysorrysorrysorry.

I’m sorry I tried to leave you.

I’m sorry that I feel the way I do about you.

The oatmeal is warm on my throat, it is sweet and filling. My body feels like all bones as it slides into my stomach and fills me.

Dr. Kayla told me that I have to change. That I can’t return to the same life if I want to get better. I was sitting in her office, and everything felt white. Harsh and aching, like pearly teeth grinding against each other. She took my hand gently and tried to meet my eyes. She told me that since I could no longer pay, since there wasn’t a good way to keep me here, I have to be different.

Change.

No more kitchen knives.

No more bandages.

No more water slopping out of a bathtub.

No more Charlie sobbing with her hands red and shaking.

When I finish eating, Charlie takes both of our plates. She cleans them in the sink, and her hair falls off her shoulder. She hums a slow tune, a sort of sad ballad.

She hunches over the dishes a little, and her soft unmarked skin catches a beam of light from our window. It trickles in through the glass panes and dots her skin in beautiful slivers. She is dressed in baggy, torn jeans and a crop-top – and for a moment I think that this is what preachers speak of when they talk about god.

What else could someone think? Charlie is a creature of light. There is divinity in the way her fingers find their place on a sponge. There is something pure and raw in the way she lets scalding water turn her fingertips red without ever flinching. The rays of light crowning her can be nothing but holy.

If god does exist (sin), he must live in her. He must live in her torn jeans. He must be nestled in her heel while she crushes a dying bug to take away its pain. He must live in the fishnet gloves and the gaudy fabrics she sews. When she is broken down to dust I believe she would smell like old churches and burning stars.

When I woke up screaming from nightmares of hell, Charlie was always there.

She would hold me while I whispered the details of the dream. She would meet me eyes and say no Eva, no when I called what we were doing a terrible sin.

She just held me and let me cry. She never asked me to move on from what happened in those old pews. She waited for me to recount the feeling of a worn Bible and the dark of the room they tried to fix me in. She held me while I cried and told me I was not a sin. I was beautiful.

I was sixteen when my father found me, dirty and sinning. My lips tasted like cherry chap-stick and my soul tasted like fire.

That night, the church felt red. It felt like red hands pulling off tousled clothes. It felt like holy water and holy words and hands and bodies trying to give me back some tiny sliver of all that holy. Those hands grabbed and pinned and they…

I swallow and squeeze my shirt.

I look up at the ceiling and let out a silent scream.

Am I holy yet?

Charlie has brought me to the couch, she lets me lean against her as we watch television. The channel is flickery and full of bright colors. They make my eyes ache.

She clears her throat.

“I-” eyes squeezed close. “I’m sorry that I didn’t realize you were feeling like this again. I should have known.”

Her quiet humming, she hums the same way a toddler clutches a patchy blanket in their little fists. Humming is her little blanket, her protection against the world.

Answer her.

I open my mouth and search for my words. I haven’t spoken in weeks, but I want her to have an answer.

My voice is raspy, it feels like sandpaper pulled from my throat.

“Not your fault.”

Her eyes grow bright with surprise, and she stares at me. Her humming is a little more frantic, her voice wavers ever so slightly.

“It was, though, Eva. I didn’t stand up for you. I wasn’t home when your family came. I-” her voice cracks. “I promised I would help you, if you ever felt this way.”

She gestures at my arms when she says this. Her hands encompassing the expanse of damaged flesh.

“They’re never going to get to you again, you know that?”

My bottom lip trembles, and I paw at my eyes. Pushing the tears back.

“I love you,” she whispers, squeezing my hand.

sinsinsin.

“They wouldn’t stop,” I whisper, burying my hands in the shirt. “They wouldn’t stop talking.”

They found me. They brought their Bibles and they brought their crosses and they talked and talked. They talked about what they did to me. They talked about fixing, fixing fixing and sinning. They had angry words and they left me alone in the house when the neighbor called the police on them. They left me alone with all our knives and all my thoughts and all my sins.

I crumple, sobbing in her arms.

“Sorry,” I whisper. “Sorry.”

I’m getting her clothes dirty.

She cradles my head and rocks back and forth. “No apologizing, okay? None of that.”

She’s crying, her hums have turned into trembling tears on her angel cheeks and she is squeezing me to her.

“We’re going to get better, yeah?” She asks, holding my face in her hands – our eyes meeting. "We’re gonna make sure that you don’t have to feel this way. Tell me what you feel, why you did this.”

I open my mouth and close it.

I want to die

“It’s a sin,” I whisper. “This is a sin.”

Charlie flinches. She squeezes her eyes closed and leads me gently to the shower.

“We are not a sin, okay?”

She turns on the water.

“Your parents were bad people. Your church, they were all bad. Right?”

The eye that mocks a father, that scorns an aged mother, will be pecked out by the ravens of the valley, will be eaten by the vultures.

I don’t speak.

“You are beautiful, Eva. I love you. I love you and I want you to feel okay.”

We step in the shower, and we are staring at each other. Naked and soft. We are standing under the stream of rain and Charlie begins to help me wash, she is my mother and I am her child. Her hands are warm, and she washes me like she is praying. Her hands tender and bent, cleansing me. Then softly, she presses a kiss to my lips. She tastes like yellow, like new flowers and bright lemons.

"I love you. You are not a sinner. Okay?"

I close my eyes.

I am not a sinner.

I am loved.

Then a softer, timid thought.

I love you.

I am covered in lavender soap, and Charlie's angel-fingers are washing away my sins.