I used to bruise easily, anything minor, from habitual toe stubs to accidental elbow nudges. I don’t bruise too much anymore, perhaps my body has gotten stronger, able to withstand the occasional knock and the recurrent nudges. It’s the unfamiliarity with space, its corners jutting when I hadn’t been aware, or fully aware, perhaps to the extent that I could feel my body in the space but not quite in the context of its roughness, blindly believing it would soften. It is the assumption that the edges will buffer, as I miscalculate my own body's space and ability to move around. 

The bruising is slow mostly, a gradual darkening, marking the pain and its intensity with the colour of a stain. The blues and the purples and the lilacs forming a painting on skin, temporarily remembering a pain. It was there. Unassuming, their hue can deceive the suffering or rather, exaggerate its intensity. 
Isn't it well known that the smaller cuts are the ones that hurt the most? The slices of paper that cut, the knee grazes that make you cry like a child again, the pinpricks that sharpen your senses. Localised sufferings on the body that feel deeper than they actually are, that hurt more than they ought to, that are just more. 

I never remember the bruises, they colour into my skin leaving no trace after. I wonder where they disappear to. And remembering is seeing, keeping the image alive, still beating, still sketched to some extent. But bruises fade, some leaving scars, but most merely disappearing as if they had never occurred. From blues to yellows, from present to past, time renders these tints.

Why do some bruise and some cut? 

Ecchymosis. 
Ec, out of. 
Chymosis, fluid.
Pouring out of.
Bleeding. Leaking. 

I think of bruises as a leaking, a movement into a place where they shouldn’t go, a gradual emptying into another unfamiliar place. Perhaps a warning to look before you move, to wait before you walk, to take time in your surroundings.

But under the skin. Underneath a pouring, a whole bleeding. There is an intimacy to it, a closeness, a desire to be left under. To heal below the surface, to leave unannounced, to disappear.