Untitled (overhauled)

I gently touched the purplish bruises dotted across my neck, wincing at even the slightest touch. The marks were perfect carbon copies of the fingers that had inflicted the damage last night. Removing my own fingers and turning my head to the side, I inspected the gash across my right eyebrow in the mirror. Luckily, I wouldn’t need stitches; however, it would definitely leave a scar.

“Oh joy, yet another to add to the collection. I look like I was in a goddamn war already for Christ’s sake. I don’t need more battle wounds to add to the effect,” I thought to myself, sighing and wrapping a scarf I had managed to find around my neck to conceal the trophies I had received there. There was no need for unnecessary questions that I could not answer. Surveying myself one more time, I decided that I was as close to presentable as possible and plodded down the hallway of my little apartment to the kitchen.

My roommate, Chrissa, greeted me with a wave from the table as she shoveled heaping spoons of some sugar-encrusted cereal into her mouth, reminding me of a chipmunk in the process.

“Walk into something again, Aiden?” she asked as soon as her mouth was empty, her voice full to the brim with humor. She received some kind of sick pleasure in my inability to go one day without an injury.

“If only she knew,” I thought, covering my irritation at her unawareness with a half-hearted smile. “Morning to you, too.”

“Want some?” she asked, pointing to the brightly colored box, in which her grossly over processed breakfast was contained.

“Oh, definitely not. How could you even ask that question? That shit is so nauseating. I think I’ll stick with an apple. Natural and healthy,” I commented as I pulled a nice sized apple from the fridge, washed it off, and loaded it into my bag.

“I’m off to work. Got a photo shoot with a nice male model today,” I gloated, even though my shoot today was for some fashion magazine and all the models were female. Chrissa was jealous of my job and I loved to tease her about the gorgeous men I encountered. Nevertheless, as much as we picked at each other, the truth was that Chrissa was the closest thing I had to a family. We bickered like sisters, but we never fought to the point of no return. We could always come to a compromise before hatred settled into the equation.

“Yeah, yeah. Rub it in a little more, Miss I-have-a-dream-job,” she replied, all the while smiling as she said it.

I jetted out the door, hurrying down the stairs to meet the bus just before it was about to leave without me. As I settled into an empty set of seats, I thought to myself, “I may have a dream job, but I live a double life. I have duties other than those of a simple photographer, duties that caused me to have bruises all the time, and force me to cover as much of my person as possible to hide the ugly scars.” I slumped against the hard blue plastic of the bus seat. “But, it’s what I am obligated to do. I could never just be a bystander again. It would be impossible after all I know now. I’m not the type of person to just sit around and watch as people die from my inaction.” I sighed again. “It would be nice to be able to talk to someone about it all though; however, I would forever feel guilty for laying this burden on someone else just for my own selfish desires.” And, with that final thought, I found myself slipping into an uncomfortable and unplanned sleep.