The summer I turned twenty-one, I got this gnarly tattoo of a leaf bug prancing across my thigh. I fell in love with it the second I found the drawing buried in a Pinterest board. I  instantly claimed it as mine, some kind of primal instinct, some kind of half-memory – maybe, in another world, I was a decrepit cave woman with slime for hair, and I'd pull the legs off leaf bugs to eat in order to survive the next mass extinction event. You know, when meat was scarce. 

I kept messaging the artist, first asking and then begging for permission to take the drawing for my own. It was like talking to God: what started first as hello, big fan, spare an ounce of your divine dazzling light upon me? melted into hey, you still there? I've got some questions, missed you lots, I just want to know… and eventually whatever was left of that ricocheted into these ugly pleas of are you even real? Please, answer me. Over a leaf bug. I got it tattooed anyway. Who cares if they ever answered.

It wasn't long after I got that tattoo that my boyfriend beat a huge patchwork of bruises onto my legs. Now, the leaf bug stood atop a throne of matcha spills and periwinkle freckles. My boyfriend traced it with a shaky hand while I held his head in my lap. 

I'm sorry, he told me when I flinched beneath his fingernails. The artist should've reached out to you before it was too late.

He was a cute, scrawny boy with eyes made planetary by the huge shine of his glasses. When he laughed, a shadow of shame and shyness masked his face. You could tell somebody had made fun of him for it once before. That laugh – that laugh like a chirp, hollow at first, high through and through. You'd never imagine in a million years that he’d beat somebody (people told me that, a million and one times), but I guess it's not fair to say that he did that. Not at first, at least. He pushed me down the stairs before he ever laid a hand on me.

You don't know what it's like. A love that turns you inside out, that dissects, that pulls teeth and tongues the weepy pink. He kissed my belly hairs, he learned how to sew just to mend the shreds in my favorite skirt – and when he liked me, it felt like the universe glowed, every atom happy to introduce itself to me. When he hated me, every nerve on my body felt electrically charged, on the verge of total implosion. It wasn't like he said jump and I said how high, it's like he said jump and my body started its navigation towards the nearest bridge. I'll jump for you, dearest. I'll prove to you how high I can soar.

When he hit me, he invented a new kind of touch, of affection, of affirmation. Nobody had ever made my spine sing. Nobody had ever orchestrated violet rings across my flesh. Nobody had ever investigated the tiniest crooks, searched inside the deepest pits – he found them and planted his flag, my all-American boy, conquering my sprawl with his fingerprints. 

Nerd. Gentle soul. Loved his mom. Talked about glaciers, climatology. Read books about feminist theory, offered to do the dishes. He kissed me goodnight. He threatened to kill me. Nobody loved me or hated me like he did. His hands curled around my limbs, posing me like a doll, bringing me to my senses – he was my father and my god and my soulmate and my everything and when he told me I was nothing I ceased to exist. He'd trace the lines of my tattoo, and whisper: pretty girl. Pretty. Like he was amazed. Like it was his little secret.

You force me to do this when you act up, he growled like a dog as he pinned my wrists to the kitchen tile. It made sense, this time, one of the few times it ever did – I threatened my wrist with a cleaver, the cornflower veins like ribbons around the necks of sacrificial lambs. At least I did it over the sink. No mess, baby, see? 

I spit in his face. He slapped me. I cried.

You want to hurt, he rolled his eyes as he bared his teeth, let me do it, it's the least you can do.

So I laid there and I took it and I took it until my ribs screamed like casualties and my body broke with red. Slash after slash. I was inanimate. I was obliterated. I was one-dimensional. My body was built to experience one sensation: whatever he gave me permission to feel. 

After we broke up, I laid in the darkness in our old shared bed, plucking the hairs off his pillowcase, bringing them to my nose to smell the humid stench of herbal cigarettes that haunted his body. I traced my leaf bug. I touched myself until I finished. Then I went to the bathroom and made myself vomit until I screamed. It was all that was left inside me.

A few weeks later, I got a notification: the artist.

Hi, sorry for no reply! Unfortunately, I'm not comfortable with having my work tattooed on other people, but I appreciate your compliments. Wanna follow each other and stick around? 

We started talking. The artist was a pretty girl with dark hair divided up into twin high ponies. Blue gloss patterned her symmetrical mouth. A little angel with knockoff jewelry – my kind of lady, with the green stains polluting her knuckles.

She only lived an hour away, but we never ended up meeting. Sometimes we'd tease the edge of the portal, flirt with visiting, offer a hand – and one of us would teeter on the edge before scampering back to safety. Maybe another day. Winter break? Your birthday? Find me sometime. I will, I promise.

We talked every day for a hundred days. I counted. She liked every post of mine, left a cheeky comment in every shade of sardonic on my mania-induced photo-dumps featuring tear-torn eyeliner mottling my cheeks and carnival food loitering in my teeth, my stacks of books I took pictures of but never read, my friends she’d never get to meet. She was invisible and everywhere. I'd tell her everything. She was the first person I told about the abuse. She vowed to kiss it better when she finally found me. She'd part the seas of people, gather me in her arms, and she'd hug me so tight all the seams holding me together would unravel, and she'd play with the threads until she twisted them up into a new girl-thing. Right back at her, I'd scream in her comments U INVENTED BEAUTY BBQUEEN and at night she'd whisper the worst things to have ever happened to her through the blue screens of our private chats. I loved her and her art and her notifications on my screen. She was a luminous, addictive little robot, one I kept in my pocket, one I kept in my head. Don't ask me for her name. 

Except, one day, I posted a picture of me at a wedding, and I was wearing a shorter dress – a teal one, shiny like a beetle’s shell, if it matters – and the meat of my thigh glimmered underneath the fluorescents, and the leaf bug danced across my flesh. My old friend. My faded trinket. My bug.

The artist left one comment: ?

And then she blocked me. And I ceased to exist.

Sometimes, in the shower, I look down at my leg and imagine carving out the skin, freeing the circus of nerves and muscles and tendons, soothing the wound with cozy vanilla lotion. I'd throw the tattoo in the trash. Crumple and feed it to the flames, let it be licked into incineration. I'd walk around bleeding. I look down at my leg and imagine the artist’s blue lips flattening against the leaf bug, smashing it dead with her love. I imagine shaving my legs and letting the razor slide. I imagine sleeping on the kitchen tile, letting the cold sink into my body. 

Phylliidae. Little baby. You’re the only one who sticks around.

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Savannah Gripshover is a writer and college student living in Kentucky. Her work has previously appeared in Miniskirt Magazine.