TITLE: Scab.
AUTHOR: Mexx
DISCLAIMER: Not mine… you know the drill.
RATING: PG-13.
SUMMARY: Faith thinks metaphorically.

A scab. That’s what I sometimes feel like: Disgusting and bloody and painful. I think that’s what they see me as too; not something good, but a patch of dirty skin that should be covered up with a band-aid until it heals and goes away.

Scabs aren’t pretty, and they aren’t really made naturally, they’re the result of hurt, of bleeding and of accidents. They’re the result of being hit when you’re seven years old, of fighting for respect when you’re a teen, of being a slayer and fighting your way through life.

Sometimes scabs are only little. A tiny cut that heals quickly. Small and insignificant and unnoticeable until someone comes along and picks at the scab, rips off the top and exposes the hurting centre, makes the scab bleed anew.

Sometimes, I feel like the skin under a scab. Dark pink and vulnerable, if the scab is broken then the tender flesh is exposed and easily damaged. Broken skin, slowly healing, shielded from the world by a cracked, ugly, hard exterior. The skin beneath the scab takes time to heal, but give it time and protection it needs it will heal itself… but it is never given what it needs, and it never does heal. People damage the scab protecting the wound, the wound is exposed and it takes longer and longer and longer to heal.

They don’t see me like this, they don’t see that the person they think I am is really a scab, protecting the real me, hiding the real me from being infected by the world. The hack and hack away at the scab, constantly bruising it and hurting it and inch by inch they get rid of the scab until all that’s left is the real me, hurting and tender and vulnerable.

-- finis