Growing Pains: A Sequence of Lessons

I

in her own skin

It was simple and clear-cut as skin and bone, as the blood running through her veins like water singing through riverbed stones. In her birdcage-garden of a prison, she'd never really felt, touched, experienced what abundance of pleasure a living body could give. In the mornings she opened her eyes to warm flannel curving like lamb's wool to make room for her body, soft and smelling of nothing but the perfume of her own musk and sweat. Utena commented: 'you never smelled of anything but flowers before,' and she laughed and stretched into the blankets and rediscovered the fact that she was a flesh-and-blood girl and no longer a rose to be plucked.

II

finding pin pricks

She never thought it was lost until she gained it back again, and when it came upon her it surged like an electric tide, sparking in her recognition of something that had been like a constant companion for so long it became nothing but a vanished and unfelt appendage. Utena found her by the window with a needle in her hand, laughing numbly and letting the tears run down her face in unchecked rain-trails. "I forgot how needles hurt," she said to her in the end, sobbing and clutching her bleeding finger in boundless joy. This was funny. She didn't think she could have missed pain.

III

we never want to wait

"No," she had said, pressing her soft white fingers against Anthy's heart, as if she'd been checking a pulse. Her own hands stilled, caught in the action of slipping the silk shirt from around her shoulders, rounded and café au lait brown, and fluttered in their nervousness like trapped moths.

Time enough to hear the heat-drenched pulse of her heart, to see too much wanting in the eyes watching her like still water's depths. Haunting and needing, but calm. "Why not?" the question came as she traced her fingers down the buttons of her shirt.

"Wait until you want it just for you," and her words stayed when she'd gone to make the tea.

IV

weathering the elements

It was a rainy day unsuited for walking on water-smoothed beach sand, passing under muted greys and silver-edged thunder clouds. Her feet dug heel and toe marks into the sand, grey silt and brown sugar grittiness edged in between her toes. This was autumn, and the white sundress clung to her like wet paper, goose bumps formed on her skin.

"Himemiya it's too cold today."

Yes, but I need to reacquaint myself with temperature. Her skin shivered in the wind, and she felt the salt lined her skin like a protective coating. Heat and cold were new sensations. Alien to her flesh.

V

leaving memories on herself

When the shatter-sharpened glass sunk edgeways into her palm, she stared at it. Did nothing.

It sliced into layered skin and severed those tiny vessels for blood to travel through, she told herself, redness seeping from the cut and pouring in an unsteady line down her wristline, bleeding through her sweater cuff. It was liquid life she was losing, she thought, and the glass fragment clattered to the empty linoleum, fingerprinted with her blood. Only her own blood.

"It will leave a scar," Utena said, making ready with the towel fluffing between anxious hands.

"My first," she said, even though it wasn't. Only the first to touch skin.

VI

to the small and simple

The knitting stretched across her lap, a complex layer of intercrossing lines, hooked in and out. They touched and mingled like lovers, the needles hooked them gently into patterned chains. She set down her scarf in making, watched it slip through her fingers and settle into soft fabric folds. "Have you ever thought we…?" she asked hesitantly into the atmosphere of the room, her words edging harshly into their soft and peaceful silence.

"No," Utena said.

And that's the end of it.