Her life, as is the case with many women of her age. Many women of any age, if the truth be told. And men too, looked like any other. She was professional. Donned her suit and smile every morning. Seamlessly whole. Accomplished. She had won accolades for her sales performance. Her team, taking the win on the “kitchen wars.” She did not gloat. With an easy laugh and a soft disposition, she did not court enemies. She was liked well enough. Though not known. In darker moments, she wondered if they knew her at all. Would they like her? But no one ever asked, so she never told.
Her gentle prettiness endeared her to men—there was a vulnerability about her, but she was not beautiful enough to pose a threat to other women. Her dark empathetic eyes were slightly too close together, in her opinion, and her nose rather cumbersome. On the surface, her skin was perfect. Smooth. Glowing. But up close, her epidermis was a collection of tiny paper cuts that had shaped her body and spirit as she had navigated through this life of hers.
As a child, she had watched her mother’s dreams disintegrate into the daily drudge of care and compromise. Her father sought solace in Captain Morgan. The violence. She had seen the breakdown of the marriage, the struggle for money. The miscarriage that had tipped it all over the edge. There were other hurts too, of course. Slights that stung. Each confrontation, each event a thin slice into her skin. Building.
School added layers; the shyness she had created as a protective orb around her did little to stop the weak seeking power. Girls smelled her vulnerability, and like hyenas, they would circle their prey, laughing. Boys paid her no mind. She preferred it that way. Silent, at least. Little cuts on little cuts. And all the while, the voices of the teachers, scraping self-doubt into the psyche of her ill-formed mind. She learned quickly what girls should and shouldn’t, mustn’t and couldn’t do. There was a list, it would seem.
Adolescence brought sharper papyrus. Boys keen to show affection in a world where they had been taught an affectionless existence ribbed and jibed, the only way they knew how to be heard. To be seen. Their advances were unwanted. Pushy. The mould they wanted of her did not fit the prototype, so instead of rallying out, she rallied in. All but disappearing. And the death and loss kept coming. She was seeking always, somehow, to stem the sharp sting of the filaments of paper embedded in her skin.
A thousand tiny paper cuts in a thousand tiny ways.
She worked harder in the office than any man. Stayed later. Stood in meetings, overshadowed and out-voiced by the play for authority of her male counterparts. Her ideas grabbed but never acknowledged. It took her years to get the same promotion as those she had started with. She had avoided the sexual undertones of those that could push her forward. But still the unwanted hands. She persisted, taking the put-downs and the little quips with a silent smile while all the while the little snags in her skin—building. Quietly, diligently. Without fuss, as she had been taught.
Love was a series of fleeting highs that plummeted quickly into the depths of meaninglessness. The games overwhelming, eroding trust until she would walk away. The cumulative effect of disappointments was not a gaping wound but the slow, almost imperceptible bleed of a thousand tiny paper cuts around her heart. She could never live with another nor fully allow them in long enough to build a foundation wall.
Her decision not to have children was not a sudden epiphany but a conclusion drawn from a lifetime of observation and introspection. And the shadow of fear—the fear of repeating patterns, of inflicting unintentional wounds on an innocent she had brought into the world. The perpetrator of a paper cut chain that would never fully heal. She couldn’t bring herself to do it.
She was an anomaly. Friends who had dived into parenthood full of the hope of creating looked at her with pity and bafflement as if she had willingly opted out of life’s greatest joy. Their well-meaning inquiries another nick to her skin, reminders that she was not “normal.” “Aren’t you lonely?” they would ask after wine, the tag implying that it was an inevitability. “No,” she would think. “I’m safe.”
Life, for so many, is a succession of tiny paper cuts. None sufficient to spill blood or even create a minuscule scar, but each leaves its own subdued sting.
And one day, standing above the vast purposefulness of the ocean, or walking through the lush green trees of summer, we will look back on our lives pondering what might have been, were it not for that first cut that gave way to the ones that followed. Who might we all have been?
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