Scar Tissue

By Tehreem Ali

Ever face the dilemma of choosing between life or death, staying or walking away, remembering or forgetting, trying harder or giving up? Most of our life’s moments are spent deciding between one and the other, but imagine doing so with all your good and bad memories playing before your eyes in full technicolor...even fresher than your morning coffee’s aroma lingering in your house after you wake up. Scar Tissue brings forth to life a similar situation, with Elsa – a 20-year-old girl at the precipice of life and death as she weighs the importance of her life through some treasured memories. This short story includes some well-known words of prose and poetry, giving readers a fresh start with its wide inclusion of famous musical lyrics and references too. It’s like reading a journal entry you might have written in a past forgotten life, because Scar Tissue connects with each and every one of you, in one way or the other.
Caught in that stage of life where she must decide whether to carry on holding life’s hand or float atop the clouds of death, Elsa must realize what and who matters to her and who doesn’t. What is a passing moment and what is a permanent experience. Diagnosed with suicidal tendencies, she is provided help by the hands of someone she calls the man in the whites – her psychiatrist, who must find a way to cure what Elsa calls ‘the raven in her head.’ Without pushing her towards the edge of life once again, he must get her to realize the truth and resurrect her will to live, forever and always.
All of us fight battles others don’t know anything about – even those we deem the closest to us. All in the name of love and faith, we learn to either win those battles or pass on trying. Scar Tissue is an account of a person doing the same thing...except that it is made all the more juicy and creative by including beauteous references to words written by the likes of Sylvia Plath, Fernando Pessoa and Charles Bukowski; as well as lyrics including some by Nirvana, Matchbox Twenty, Florence+The Machine and some others.
So if you've ever felt torn between life and death and helpless, take a trip down memory lane with Elsa in Scar Tissue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tehreem Ali
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370899241

Tehreem Ali

Tehreem Ali is a 23-year-old literature-linguistics student by field but a writer at heart. She self-published her first fiction novella at the age of fifteen. Art, anarchism, music, animals, and writing are the center of her world. She aspires to show the world, through her writings, that there are no rules in art. You will find Tehreem’s writings to be a mixture of polar opposites, with Sylvia Plath, Alan Ginsberg, and the like as major influences. The world might not be ready yet for voices like hers.

Book preview

Scar Tissue

By Tehreem Ali

Copyright 2016 Tehreem Ali

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold

or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person,

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-Dedicated to Ahsan Yousaf

My best person, the best thing that ever happened to me – with every atom and molecule lingering in me still, thank you for existing.

I hope all your scar tissues heal one day.

As for this…read between the lines.

Oh and also…happy birthday. My luck topples the Eiffel tower to have a best friend like you.

SCAR TISSUE

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were; I have not seen

As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow; I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone;

And all I loved, I loved alone.

Then – in my childhood, in the dawn

Of a most stormy life – was drawn

From every depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still:

From the torrent, or the fountain,

From the red cliff of the mountain,

From the sun that round me rolled

In its autumn tint of gold,

From the lightning in the sky

As it passed me flying by,

From the thunder and the storm,

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view.

-Alone, Edgar Allan Poe

AT THE BEACH, 30TH DECEMBER, 5:30 PM

Have you ever stared into the sun and wondered how it continues to burn so brightly, without setting the whole sky around it on fire? I mean sure, science will tell you all sorts of hocus pocus over-the-top theories and laws about it; come up with all these ideas and concepts that, at their best, will only leave you with more questions. Because that is mostly what happens when something is simplified – it gets more complex, leading to more loopholes and tunnels for you to dive in.

Have you ever wondered that?

The sun, it brings beads of sweat on any living thing it shines down on. Except the sky. It does not fill this sheet with sweat; day in or day out. How it contains all the heat in and about itself only without ever letting its rays stray haphazardly and setting the whole sky it is clinging to on fire – now there is something very calm yet controlling about that, I think.

It is something I have never been good at. To be calm yet controlling at the same time.

This is what I come to realize as I am sitting here on the wet sand down at the beach cross-legged, in a thin sheet of plastic: this gown, that they made me wear all the time back at the ward. It is humid at this time of the day, the setting sun still sweltering behind a mesh of clouds lazily hanging on the evening sky. A few stars are already greeting the earth. I think I see the Belt of Orion…or maybe it is just my eyes playing tricks on me from all the anesthetic drugs they drilled in me back at the ward today morning.

Anyway. As I was saying, the sun and how it never scorches the sky around it….I often, or rather, as the man in the whites puts it, more-than-I-need-to drift off from my main topic of discussion. My conversations have never been contained, you see. Much like all else about me. They are like a tree: with branches leading to more branches from all sides, same as my sentences branch off to more sentences. Anyway, the man in the whites made me do all these techniques – speech and cognitive techniques, he told me – that would help me focus what I wanted to say into a clear, distinct pattern. He made me write about a million different topics, all in one single paragraph, with one single theme. That sort of thing. Did it ever work out? Never. I mostly just wrote gibberish. He would read it, tell me I am wasting both his time and my time and that I should try to get a firmer grip on my thoughts, or how I wanted to convey them.

But he never stopped to consider for once that if I had ever been able to do that, to get a grip on my thoughts, I would not have been there in the first place. Silly man. I do not see why everyone is so obsessed with order. All the time. Clearer, contained thoughts. A timetable that is followed regularly. Rules, patterns, more rules. The sound of coffee brewing every bloody morning precisely at eight. The thrum of the engine booming to life a few minutes after, the baby crying, footsteps running up the stairs to lock the door. The containment, the bitter-edged order about everything we do and tend to do. Why not let it flow on its own sometimes? We have become so contained in our everyday routines, our everyday lives, that is has become utterly dull and boring. Worst part? We do not even realize it, because we are so used to it. This monotonous pattern of existence we call a lifestyle. What use is a lifestyle when you cannot even realize all the other suns burning around you and realize you are a sky to them? That sometimes, you are not supposed to let the sunrays stay at a single place but let them hover and dance over you because you are the open, bright sky? I think this is not the only place the problem lies in. Losing self-worth and hope in ourselves – a shadow that drinks naught but itself – is also a step in the ladder of this dull and boring lifestyle I am talking about. You see people passing by you and you know that their perception of who they think you are is broken beyond repair; that you do not want to be seen so you lose hope and optimism in yourself. Following the ways of this world, a barren place for the unique, is not only what rules boredom; so does losing hope and becoming a ghost: you are not alive or dead, just a ghost with a beating heart.

I think if I were given the chance to write something for the man in the whites right now, something that I would like him to read every day after he woke up and think of me, it would be this. That I could never be – for him or for anyone else – a sky willing to keep all the sunrays at one point on me, that I wanted to let them shine on my vast skin – my sky, free and wild.

However, I could never be free or wild. As much as I wanted to. They kept me contained, all the time, in every rising and setting sun that shone on my sky.

Though, now it is time I take a different course for myself.

I close my eyes to the setting sun and remember back to when. The memory comes forth to life; I am reliving it again. And the colors and smells begin to flow around me…

There are always two sides to a story. And this is mine. However, I want you to know upfront that this is not some tale of damsel in distress or anything cliché like that. It is simply one person’s simplistic point of view of everything and everyone before them with the raven in their head. Some might relate to it as they see their very own unspoken words and unshed tears lingering in between these lines. Some might try to wonder if the raven can indeed be killed – without killing its host. Some will just sift through these pages looking for answers to their own questions.

But no matter your reasons, here is my account of living in a world that is a black dream, and what it feels like to walk alone each day on that boulevard of broken dream; the clawing and howling of the raven background music in that blackness and how I slip through that dream, past yours and theirs and ours and reach the end…or what may seem like the end at first. Admit it or not, each of you has their own different forms of the raven living inside your heads, one way or the other. The goal is never to shut them all in a cage, forever to be silenced. Find what it is that matches the color of the raven’s blackness and give a blanket to cover itself, camouflaged by a light so blinding – it eats itself up. The remaining embers are what you can make your armor from.

AT THE WARD, 12TH JANUARY, 10:00 AM

The dandelions look duller with each passing day. The nurse brought them over my bedside table two days ago. Yet, they seem like they have died two millennia ago, with only their course outer skins waiting to be withered by time as they sit there silently. I stare at them in silence and decide I do not like the look of them, the feeling they give me. It is putrid. I gather them from the bright blue vase that has been their grave for the last two days, it seems, and I throw them in the wastebasket placed at the edge of my bed.

‘Why did you stash ‘em away, child?’ the old nurse assigned to my bed asks me as she comes over to the left side of my bed to give me the morning dose. She eyes the dandelions in the trash as if mourning over lost friends. How fake that expression looks. She is like them too, deep inside. Withering day by day, slowly. We all are.

‘They looked dead,’ I say blankly, my gaze boring over her face in a cold manner. I wonder how many smiles that face has felt, how many of those were real, how many tears must have fallen on that face.

‘But I just brought them in fresh two days ago, child,’ she says loudly while handing me the Styrofoam cup with a pink tablet and an orange tablet lying at the bottom of it, staring up at me like two coloured, malicious eyes. I throw them down my throat in a quick swallow and take a sip of water from the cup the nurse hands me.

She does not pass any comment to my answer of the dandelions looking dead. They have stopped doing that now around here, passing comments over what I say. They know better. Perhaps, deep down they all realize I am too far gone to take any heed of what they do or do not say. I would not want it any other way, either.

After the nurse leaves, the lady in the bed next to mine yawns and stretches her bulky arms as she hops down from the bed. She is small, chubby, with only a small tuft of hair left on the side of her scalp. She is bald from the rest. When you look at her, you do not notice her bald head or short and chubby stature or try to guess her age. Instead, you notice the heavy burn marks that poke out at you from pretty much anywhere you lay