The Girl with the Pin in Her Left Arm

By Aisea Solidum

I remember a little girl who grew up with a pin in her left arm. She wasn’t born with it, although it did seem like she had to have been. 

That girl was someone I used to know really closely and from my earliest memory of her, I think that that pin was always there — no matter what sleeves she wore to cover it up. So I guess I always knew it to be there. In her left arm. That thorn under her skin. Or thumbtack. 

Remembering it now, I never really got a good look at what it actually was, or even if it was physically real, even with the fact that we were really, truly close (from what other people who remember say). One thing I know for certain was that whatever that thing was, it really was there from how much it showed in that girl. I think I can even picture it now: Her eyes a constant red with darkened circles around them to match; The pale-ish hands that came out turtle-like from her coat cuffs always being accompanied by puppy-like tremble; Even just the way her hair itself swept and fell in the outside wind. Every single thing about her seemed wrong. But she herself wasn't wrong at all. It was all because of that thing in that left arm of hers. Nonetheless, this girl who grew up with a pin in her left arm, reddened eyes, underlying circles to match, two shivering hands, and some hair with a mind of its own, was someone whom I had once called a friend. 

Although I didn’t know it then, I heard from some close family friends of hers, the pin may have been a mark of her father — that ‘daddy’ of hers, as I remember she always called him. When I was first told, I chalked it all up to be pure speculation.

I remember her, and I remember the talk everyone at one time had about that ‘daddy’ of hers. And from what I remember everyone saying, that man “had made himself out to be a well respected man”. This was how he was known in our family, the neighbor’s family, and the other neighbor’s family. This man, whose stories were told at Sunday dinner tables and mentioned in pastor homilies, solidified him as the stuff of legends, and so who I thought him to be, with the confidence of what I know now, was completely skewed. I guess I can’t entirely blame those other parents and grandmas for my misinterpretation of this man. I really only knew him through talk and passing stories. I had never even met him to begin with. And I guess nothing of what was actually true or what was only heard made a difference for that girl. The pin still lay embedded in her left arm. The left arm of the daughter he placed it in.

It was there that it stayed. The pin seemingly grew up with the girl. To anyone else, having a constant thorn in your side would be an unusual nuisance but that girl wasn’t just ‘anyone else’. To her, that pin in her left arm was just like any piercing a young girl her age would receive. The only thing different from a regular piercing was, of course, no one would deliberately stab into their arm, but also, no piercing ever hurt forever. But that one did. 

Growing up, the girl with the pin in her left arm was no stranger to its perpetual pain. In childhood, she excelled in school, something people would say was attributed to her father, yet on the playground, she itched with discomfort because of that constant thorn in her side. Like I said before, nothing was inherently wrong with that girl. The pin that stuck deep into her was all but a pin: A single flaw that ‘messed’ with her so cruelly. And, like I said before, this girl was someone I had once known and someone I had known to be perfect, save for that single flaw. Everyone would have known this too, knowing the father that raised her. Yet, the one thing no one knew growing up was that that pin in the left arm of hers would, inevitably, be the cause of her own downfall: It was, as natural for every person — yet so peculiar in her case — destined to be that unique fatal flaw of hers.

By the time she was able to make her own decisions, she thought that the pin that always stuck into her left arm would be easy enough to remove. And so by the time she graduated from her childhood, from the life she had under her daddy, she decided to take that pin and pull it out from under her skin, effectively choosing to leave it all behind her. That pin, or thorn, or thumbtack, or wedge was something so small to her now. She thought she had grown up to take on this seemingly minuscule pain in her side but that pin was no ordinary hurt. All those years — that eighteen-year darkness digging into her — rooted itself. 

The pin itself didn’t grow but as she grew into the young woman she became leaving for college, that tiny prick burrowed deeper and deeper under the skin to the point that, at times, it wasn’t noticeable any more. Still, there it sat, unable to disappear where, at times, it would fade into her. Yet, occasionally some meticulous little movement would relapse her into the throws of the indescribable pain that she had just started getting used to. It disturbed her core. It itched into her bones. It screwed with her.

What she had thought to be some fixable mistake in her arm was, in reality, a stab wound that, once removed, could inevitably end her. From what I can recall, not with my best confidence though, I don’t think she was aware of these facts. Maybe she was: I’d say that I knew her well enough that there could have been that possibility. Nonetheless, she was willing to take that chance. And so she did. 

The evening she packed her final box for college, the evening of her final goodbye to the place she had known so familiar to her, the goodbye to the loving and perfect daddy of hers, she sat on that cute little bed in the middle of the half-empty room of hers, facing the open window as she twiddled the pin in her left arm. As she felt it with her fingertips, she really believed that that very day, she would truly be free. Compelling as it was, with the breeze past the open window ushering her initiative and the things of hers packed away whispering from their cells, one small yank was all she needed to do; She grasped it.

Right when she felt the bulb of the pin upon her fingertips, right when she was so ready to pull up, it too whispered something unspeakable.

The pin, its own entity now, asked her, “Who are you without me? What else are you besides me?” It pushed further. 

“I am all that you’ve ever known yourself to be,” it teased. “Without me, you are nothing.” It was a voice so faint, radiating from her arm, persisting with its prodding. “What will you be left with?” 

This faint voice, one she had heard her whole entire life, the only voice who ever told her what to do, reverberated in her, causing her to tremble like the little girl she once was — the little girl she had been and forever will be. She shook with indescribable terror at its words, words she had known throughout her life, ones that only now resurfaced in their full magnitude. The words of her daddy.

Quaking, fingers still gripped to the end of the pin in her left arm, she slipped her grasp suddenly. In the blink of an eye, what she was left with was nothing but a horrible and ugly gash along the underside of her forearm where the pin had been, a tear zigzagged across it. The blood rushed in, a geyser of all that the pin had welled up inside her, the pin that now laid inanimate on the floor. At her, it stared.

Peering down at her arm, she was no longer “the girl with a pin in her left arm” — and at the moment she realized it completely, she regretted it. The pin, now at her feet, was chuckling, and it uttered one last thing: “See?”

No one’s to say what really unfolded in that room: Whether the pin was even physically real is still up to question. What I know for sure was that girl, the girl who thought she would become something other than that pin in her, held onto it and from then on, it stayed with her. Whether it was embedded in her or not anymore, its weight was still palpable, uphased at her puny attempt to get rid of it. The evening she packed her final box for college, she packed up that pin with her, unable to leave the disgustingly painful comfort it provided in her. And so, this pin, this unmistakable flaw of hers, one so unfixable, left her home with her. 

After that day, I never really knew what happened in those following years. She led life as normal, from all I can assume, and from what stories I heard of her being passed and told by extended relatives and family friends, she got married just fine. There were mentions here and there of the things she did and the places she saw, but never really a bigger picture that I myself can remember with confidence. You’d think that when knowing this person your whole life there would be nothing else to learn about her with all the stories you hear. But I guess that’s not really true. What’s true is that the girl never changed. She still held onto the girl she was in her childhood; She held onto who she was when that pin was still stuck inside of her. 

Believe me, she was as much that girl as she was the person she became. I know her now, and from what I heard, I believe that I can say that I knew her then. Nothing changes the fact that I knew her all my life even if she didn’t know me all hers, but how I came to see her has changed from the person I saw her as when I was younger. You learn the bigger picture, or enough of it that things start to become clear. This person who was your “friend” in childhood — the person people make remarks about because of how “close you two were” — none of it stays the same when you finally understand the things that were wrong with your own mother and why she is the way she is. And why you became the way you became. 

All those nights no one saw how vacant she was and all those times people didn’t see that side of hers, you realize that everything makes sense, because you were the one that saw. You’re older now and you can see plain as day that this pin still lives in her left arm, even when the past has long gone by. Your grandfather died too many years ago for you to remember him yet his voice still echoes in that daughter of his. Your mother is still her daddy’s girl, the very same one, and everyone else still says the same things that you already knew: She is still the girl with the pin in her left arm, her father was perfect, and you knew her so close your entire life. Some things never change, or rather, some things just can’t be changed. Every story I heard and every single mention of my mother’s name, in the end, stuck with me. Who she was was never again the same person I had known her to be and what that made me become, from all the stories I heard, all the details everyone told me, and all the things I never learned until now, made me become just like her. I am my mother’s daughter, as she was her father’s. And just like her, I guess I grew a pin in my left arm, all the same.