Bowtie

Isn't there a beauty to wounds? 

Some are superficial, barely grazing the surface. It may have even felt slightly ticklish when a thin, paper-like layer was peeled off, and you probably even didn't realise it till one day when you saw its yellowing edges and wondered how it came to be at all. You think hard, and laugh it off. Silly you.

There are others, the deeper ones- gashes you have known and felt; you know every contour of the ragged wound- you can still smell the blood that has now started to dry in crimson flakes, ever so gently tugging at the skin around it. You are already picturing the scar it will leave, a small part of you is even excited about it. Mortal remains of a time forgotten, a dreaded memory that still gets your heart to beat a little faster, not out of fear or anger, but out of anticipation, because it is healing- you are seeing its little lips close up- it goes from yellow to brown to red to black, and like a sunset, you have yourself at the close of an epoch, full of hope, carefully placed hope this time.

You know what aren't beautiful? Stitches. As if the wound wasn't painful enough, you now prick yourself, and again, and again, begging for it to stop bleeding. And with each tug, you pull the string a little tighter, no, you don't want to see its gaping mouth, lest it narrates to you the horrors you were running away from before you fell. You bite on hard and stitch, and stitch, and stitch, until you know it is sealed forever- you don't want a random nick to unravel your day's labour. 

So you stitch, to keep it all together; you stitch tight, ignoring the screaming protests of your skin; you stitch tighter, for you know you should have let it heal a long time ago and you didn't. You even make a little bowtie at the close, make it look pretty.

Who are you kidding? The stitches leave an ugly scar, pink and naked, staring at you right in your face. Your little pink bowtie is shrivelled, and almost non-existent. Now what you have for yourself is a daily reminder of how you closed up a wound that was never meant to be tended to.