Tara Tompkins

To understand me you must first understand a girl called Tara Tompkins, a girl whom I only met on occasions and they weren’t frequent let me tell you that.

Tara Tompkins was the girl who changed my life, she was different to anyone I had ever met before then and quite honestly scared me as much as she intrigued me. She sat next to me in French and spoke to no one, people made fun of her plainly because they didn’t understand her. I was mostly drawn to her by my curiosity, the things she wore, the little she spoke and those strangely beautiful crisscross patterns she wore etched onto her arms. They stood out beyond any other feature, like flesh coloured bracelets binding her to something unknown.

My life officially changed forever the day she decided to talk to me, that was all it took and from the first hello she would tell me about her single parent mum to her girlfriend’s life and how she wanted to move in with her but wasn’t sure whether she was ready. Other times it would be photo of her boyfriend, who she had moved in with after a major fight with her mother.

One day I remember hearing from a few bullies in my French class that she had ‘turned’ and had been found slitting her wrists in the toilets, I didn’t speak to her again after that. I didn’t fully understand what they meant by wrist slitting when the girls talked and gossiped about her afterwards, I did not realize that they were referring to the method in which the wondrous patterns on her arms had appeared. And then she disappeared.

I never told anyone that I missed her, the way she wore dog collars around her wrist amongst numerous other plastic neon bands and strings, a personal collection of memories. I missed the way the dark make up rimming her eyes was always quite badly smudged, her grungy heavy shoes, her chipped dark usually black nail varnish and the different t-shirts she wore under her uniform. But mostly I simply missed her presence, one that was so plainly different and unique, one that screamed ‘I don’t want to change so FUCK OFF’ and I missed how I was not the only strange kid in the room. Maybe my reasons were purely selfish, but she made me want to be me, no one else just me.

I remember the first pattern that I made on my arm, I had been in fight with my father before walking into an exam, and never had I felt like such a failure before. Which exam it was I do not recall but I sat and felt nothing, too used to the taunting and belittling feelings my dad brought to my chest, that I had become numb and senseless. I wanted to feel like I had never wanted to feel before, like my whole being craved any emotion that it could grab a hold of.

To this day I will never understand what took over me but I raised the metal end of my pencil, which had once held an eraser and had now been chewed and sharpened, up to my left wrist and dragged it slowly, bluntly but deeply across. The skin it split and at first the blood didn’t come but that was ok because the stinging sensation had almost eased the numbness up enough to feel pain.

I was 14 when I first became a cutter, it wasn’t because of Tara but I suddenly felt her pain, I understood her and who she was. She was lost, and so was I. The difference was that I wasn’t brave enough to embrace this, I hid my scars and wounds from every preying eye in the world, and she flaunted hers like jewels or clothes. She knew she was lost and never once denied it, but instead of pretending to be happy she openly expressed her hatred and unhappiness. What I will never know or understand is why me?