Alexandra Santos' Journal Entries

April 21, 2014

Fix Me

I'd been bleeding for a while, waiting for someone to notice. When no one did, I ran to you expecting you to fix it. I always expected you to fix it. And although I expected you to fix it, I did my best to push you away. Here is the ugly truth: I was scared. I felt that even if you attempted to fix me, you wouldn't be able to. I was afraid of being broken beyond repair. So, despite the tears I shed against your shoulder and the trembling of my body in your arms, I didn't want you to try. I didn't believe that I needed you to. Deep down, I only expected you to stay. I only wanted you to keep fighting, to remind me that I was worth fighting for. But you couldn't handle the truth. You couldn't handle the promise you bored me with: you would never leave me. You ended up leaving me with an aching heart, tearing it at the seams.

Could I blame you? Of course not. I left you with no choice. You couldn't handle watching me take a blade to my veins. You couldn't handle watching me struggle to stay awake as pills dissolved in my system. You wanted to help, but I didn't let you. I wouldn't let you... Yet, I expected you to hold out a little longer. In reality, I wanted you to fight me back. I wanted you to refuse my shove and force your way into my heart. I wanted you to love me unconditionally. But you couldn't. And just like you can't forgive me, I can't forgive you. "Best Friends"... that's what we were supposed to be. But definitions change, as do people. You grew tired, a nap overdue. You lost strength, yelling at me telling me you'd save me as you struggled to pull me up to safety. But you... gave up. I promised if I fell and you didn't catch me, I'd forgive you. But I also promised that if I hit the bottom and you didn't try to help, I'd let you go.

-Alexandra Santos

July 4, 2014

False Beauty

The definition of beauty was brought up to me when I was six. Beauty wasn't a problem for little girls because we only wanted to play. We only wanted to be joy and kindness. Beauty was something our mother's were, even without the dazzling reds and pinks she colored her face with. When I was eight, I thought about mud and laughter being similar like I couldn't be happy without getting a little dirty. But being a girl and acting like a boy, even at that age, was unacceptable. Girls who were girls came up to me and told me I was wrong. That my guesses to who I was, was a fallacy. They called me "ugly. fat. santa claus"- because that was a clever way of referring to me being fat. My face was an art piece that was washed away and put together and scribbled on, I had no perfect lines or straight edges. My eyebrows were furrowed into one even without me trying. My teeth were signs pointing in different directions, people were confused as to which way I was pointing for them to follow. My freckles were spread across my face like some little kid took an orange marker and started stabbing my face with it. I was overflowed with skin and lumps that I didn't know would ever define me, but they did.

I didn't learn the definition of beauty until I was eleven and society thought "well isn't this a great age to tell young girls that they will only be pretty if they were skinny and had pretty hair and perfect teeth and perfect boobs"- that obviously I didn't have. Girls were no longer human, we were objects. I was an object no boy desired to play with and even though to my parents, that was a good thing, I couldn't help but wonder why. I had braces to fix the signs to only point straight. I pulled apart my eyebrows so at least they would make me look somewhat normal. I rubbed foundation on my skin hoping to get rid of the stupid kid's ink marks. But that was never enough.

I still looked in the mirror and no matter how hard I tried to erase all the rights the girls made, The voice in my head agreed and said to dig a little deeper, find beauty the way it would be accepted. So I spent nights reading magazines of Victoria Secret Models. I learned about diet pills and wondered if I would ever be able to get my hands on them. I learned to challenge death because the voice in my head was becoming too loud for me to bare. I tried turning down the volume, but the shrieks only grew and I knew that I would never be beautiful. Six year old girls made sure of that. I fell in love with the Grim Reaper and asked him to take me with him, but even he saw no beauty in me and pushed me aside. I was defeated by girls who knew nothing at the time. That didn't know their words would drive me to nothingness, to drive me into a darkness that would fill a void in my heart. I took a blade and slit my wrists hoping beauty would somehow slip out of it because I learned only true beauty could be found on the inside, but nothing came except for the loss I felt to the words that made me a failure. I was learning to define myself the same way those girls did: "nothing. worthless. disappointment."

I wasn't put together like a puzzle, I had missing pieces that couldn't be found because I hid them between lines in poems I learned to write to convince people I was happy. I came to a point where I fell in love and that love showed me no remorse. When I was rejected, those girls taunted me reminding me they won. I kept pressuring myself to believe I was defined by my future, not my past. But in my head I was defined by the suicide notes I wrote and rewrote, hoping it would make sense one day. I was defined by the scars that painted my wrists like an abstract art piece people asked me about. I was defined by the mascara that ran down my face instead of the dark circles beneath my bloodshot eyes. And I continued to stare into the mirror and witness the shakiness I felt.

I watched as my eyes grew smaller and my voice grew quieter. I watched as the girl I once knew to be free and childish understand that she was never going to be beautiful in the sense of how society presented it. She was never going to be defined by her depression, her cuts and bruises or her scars. She was never going to be defined by the anxiety that filled her lungs when she was pushed out of her comfort zone. She was never going to be defined by her eating disorder because you could never tell with all that fat surrounding her waist and arms. She was never going to be defined by panic attacks she felt when her eyes buried into his hands being held by a pretty girl. Because pretty was never something you thought when you saw me... her.

I practiced beauty like it was a test I needed to study for, but I didn't know what to learn. I couldn't figure out wrong from right and my personality was built up of multiple identities, it suffocated me. I had all these flaws that I had written on my skin well before I knew how to write. The ink was embedded into my skin, a reminder that it would never be perfect. And I am not going to explain that I learned to love myself and that I realized true beauty is found within my heart because it's still a working process that I still have my doubts about. I haven't discovered the beauty my parents did when they first saw me. I don't know beautiful the way my friends do when they say that's who I am, because when I stare into the mirror I see that eight year old girl I once was. And I want to tell her it's going to be okay. I want to scream that their words are nothing and to not listen to meaningless ideas that weren't meant to be heard. I want her to see beauty in a new light, to give girls a reason to change the definition of being an object to being human. Because in some ways, humanity is beautiful. And I'm only human.

-Alexandra Santos

February 1, 2015

The Last Breathe

We are constantly asked by the masses to spread our arms to expose all our dark corners. We are constantly summoned to introduce our fears and stitches. We are poked and probed like a doctor's research project. But when we are finally pulled apart, hanging off the hinges, we are left with nothing but out flaws and their accusations. Her body was a walking meat suit, her soul deserted in her closet. She's hanging on a thread trying to be okay, but the seas has become more than distance. It's an endless story of the unknown. Tsunami's are beginning to stir, shaking the ocean ground with its destructive beauty. She's whispering through her tears, hoping to drown out the constant ache that found home in her heart. Her shivers are shouting to the world to stop all its hate and misfortune. She's questioning her sanity, hoping to God someone hears her cry and answers it with soft voices and sweet kisses. What used to be a game of love and innocence is now a lost soul that missed the chance to breath and a damaged life to continue walking down Broken Boulevard. She can't breath. Her life is a medley of messes, but I hope she knows we can hear her. I can hear you. I know life is a little messy and unfair. But it's all a gamble. You bet friendship and won the Jackpot. We are here and we can hear you.

-Alexandra Santos

September 12, 2015

A Dead Language

There's a misconception as to what we think we deserve and to what we end up with. Three years ago, I thought I deserved a broken heart that matched mine. I thought I needed his broken pieces to fix me. I wanted broken pieces because I was scared of perfection. I'd been mismatched with beauty and followed a path that ran against love, never into it. I've stopped in the middle, staring into the mirror. The misunderstanding of what we thought we deserved derived from the mirror. It reflects our desires and sets our hearts on fire. We burn in a blaze, yearning for a place to feel welcomed... a pair of arms to wrap around our entangled emotions and accept them warmly. It's a silly idea wanted by those who haven't lost sight of the dead language. I'm looking for a new story... a novel to be filled with real love. Because those ideas had to come from somewhere. They had to be real at some point. Romance is a dead language, but I'm going to revive it. I'm going to pull myself apart and embed myself into its code. I'm going to rearrange its equation and brush it against paper to create a novel. A story for the generation. A story to remind me that my heart isn't broken... that I'm not broken.

-Alexandra Santos