School breaks let loose immense extents of free time, and being the pathetically social life lacking teenager that I embarrassingly was, I mainly spent those extra hours asleep. Continuing this, I had passed shameful expanses of winter holiday in my bed. While this wasn’t particularly lousy on its own, I had done close to nothing else, forcing me to repeatedly panic over the fact that I was wasting my existence and glaring at life ticking by impossibly fast yet simultaneously painfully slowly as I waited to cease being me.
Unfortunately, I had hopelessly given up on seizing the biting hours by the rapid end of my break, instead resigning to laying blearily in bed until twelve and spending the of my time off hanging up laundry while idiotically dancing around my room, blasting Blink’s live CD and desperately trying to pretend that I was there, breathing in the jumping crowd and living instead of scarcely surviving on distractions.
Even this lame plan was obnoxiously ruined, though, by a cracking knock on my door at nearly eleven. I was already groggily awake, though I was still clinging groggily to the last peels of sleep, Joseph curled loosely in my arms and my scrambled thoughts still partially believing that I was dreaming. My mind was impressively slow at jolting back into reality after being stuck in the whimsical fantasy world that it had created as I snored into emptiness. I’d been dreaming of winning some sort of odd singing game show – this was impossible and exceedingly ridiculous for multiple reasons, the least of which being my perpetual reluctance to sign along to even my favorite music because I it simply did the songs an injustice. Nothing that my brain constructed late at night was ever logical, though, increasingly rarely even possible.
My watery eyes were pried to open, annoyingly, mind weakly realizing that I was a resident of Earth and not Lala Land as I stared cautiously at my waving walls, rolling sluggishly out of bed and turning my irritated gaze on the door a moment later. With a stinging, sleepy look, rumpled hair, and what must have been a slightly peeved expression, I tugged my creaking door open, frowning when I spotted May on the other side with my half-lidded glare.
She just shot me a fake smile, declaring, “Mom told me to wake you up because we have to be at Grandma’s in two hours and you take forever to get ready.”
I slowly grumbled something unintelligible in acknowledgement, shutting and locking the door as my sister happily padded off down the hall. Dejectedly staring at the dinged wood facing me after she left, I pulled mindlessly on the fraying hem of my sweatpants, muddled mind belatedly hoping that they hadn’t previously been low enough to expose any of the thin red lines patterning my hips.
I stumbled back across my messy room, thumping down onto the edge of my bed and watching my fingers twiddle together, thumbs still vertically dashed across with jagged, ripped scratches. I was replacing those defects faster than they healed.
Biting my peeling lip as my brain spun fully into frenzied action, my thoughts whirled into a bizarre hurricane of screams, wails, and complaints. And suddenly, I was mad.
Fucking pissed, because I already planned on doing nothing that Sunday, having completely forgotten about the stupid ass family get together I was supposed to visit, and, really, was it so impossible to desire having one single day where I didn’t have to be subjected to some crap that I despised? Obviously, yes. It was absurd, really, but as I gloomily contemplated my abused fingers, I couldn’t help but speculate about what I'd done to deserve all the shit that I suffered through, even though enduring a relative gathering wasn’t actually such an unbearable pain.
I glanced at the flashing red numbers that continuously assaulted me every morning, quietly clocking the fact that I had an excessive amount of time to get ready. It would barely take an hour to shower, style my hair, and struggle into my clothes. I’d continued the detrimental practice of skipping breakfast over the holiday, and, therefore, had right over an hour to spare.
Here’s the thing: lately, I’d often been throbbingly thinking about why society sees everything the way it does. How come stick skinny was considered attractive when fat was repulsive? Why were people who excelled at technical Science and painted like two year olds geniuses while talented actors with C’s in math were embarrassingly stupid? Who decided that blue is for boys and pink for girls?
I rarely did anything exclusively for myself any more. I worked endlessly for good grades because that was what was expected of me, not because I cared about finding the determinant of extensively pointless matrices. I eyed the sweets sitting above of our fridge critically and passed them by not motivated to my own desire to be skin and bones, but because criticizing people would frown at my muscle less body if there was any more fat clinging to it. I didn’t even want to spend my lunches having a stare down with the metal ridges of a blemished cafeteria table as Rian and Zack flirted obnoxiously across from me; the only reason I didn’t pass that rushing time reading in the library was because everyone would think that I was an undesirable freak if I did.
I fully realized that I had all the incorrect motives to do anything, and nearly nothing in my life was truly driven by my own wants. Yet, this exempted certain exceptions, of course including cutting. Because I noticed no logical reason for our world to see someone intentionally hurting themselves as bad; I loved the emotions it produced, and slashing my bones was one of the decreasingly limited actions that made me experience positive feelings. I obsessively covered the scars on my hips because humans would be alarmed and sick if they were exposed, not because of my own shame at the red lines. No, as it was, they were quite my favorite part of my disappointingly average body. The injuries were beautiful.
So if no one had to discover how I destroyed myself and I enjoyed it, why shouldn’t I cut? I literally didn’t see anything defective in that attitude towards it.
I ended up teetering on the dented end of my mattress, eyes clicking between the sharpened piece of metal glinting glaringly in my fingers and the cuts lining my exposed skin that I was barely starting to accept were scars. It had taken me a stupidly long time to internalize, but the red stripes would distort my flesh for lasting years. One of the initial cuts on my arm was still there, faded translucent violet against my pale skin, scar tissue wrinkled and fragile. I couldn’t take this back. No matter what I did, I would always be a cutter.
My loss of control over my last increment of break had me freaking out and despondent, my own decisions having seemingly no effect on the events that constituted my life. The most random, meaningless happenings regularly set me off. I didn’t understand it, but then again, there wasn't a substantial quantity that totally made sense to me anymore.
But one of the only remaining facts that was clear and definite to me was the splitting my skin made me feel good, and I certainly occasionally deserved some happiness, even if the means of obtaining it were somewhat reprehensible.
I didn’t care anymore, so I laid back in thrumming quiet of my room, slipping the razor haltingly into my flesh, wincing and relaxing into the acute pain. I didn’t particularly care for the fundamental sting of the blade, but I loved the ache it originated, the throbbing pierce from open, blood-red slashes. I went at it on my right hip, crisscrossing through the healing cuts and flimsy remnants, slitting between them, occasionally scraping across them in the final strokes of five tally sets.
The blood dripped over my skin, tracking and smearing over my stuttering side, threatening to stain my exposed white sheet. I caught the runs with a hasty tissue, leaving a slim crimson tarnish staining my hip to partner the self-inflicted wounds. I looked at the stark contrast with curious, fascinated eyes, contemplating how such a supposedly terrible act could possibly leave this beautiful aftermath and wondering if that line of speculation could possibly be normal. Obviously impairing myself in any way was not usual, but did others who took sinister blades to their depressed bodies have the same beliefs, or was I alone?
After three cuts I was at shaky peace, breathing flat, stumbling mind relaxed. It made me question mental state, being calm in that insane situation, the alarming act itself that pulled the serendipity over me. I actually was aware of why that was, though, and it was genuinely because of a function of my brain working perfectly correctly: my body had been stretched to see pain and cutting as beneficial, and therefore released dopamine, the happiness chemical when metal scratched scars onto it. Our minds are so easy to easy to manipulate; a couple exuberance inducing events effortlessly fool our pleasure centers into finding them profitable. Although, I suppose it does make sense for brains to value their own health over physical well being.
Blood mostly surging within the parameters of the cuts I’d produced, I leisurely laid my legs to the side, allowing myself easy access to my lower half, those inches of skin somewhere in the blur between hips and ass. My favorite section to slash was my hipbone, since it was sharp and slight and created the perfect sketchbook for my brushstroke slices with the thin, paper-like covering of skin, but it was already covered solidly in injuries, old and new, healed light and recently open alike.
So I reluctantly moved to the deeper area, where there was more body to cut past before hitting bone. Taking a rasping breath, I gritted my cheek between my rough teeth, shredding in as far as I could bear.
Immediately after jerkily pulling back the malicious blade, blood pooled and spilled over the ragged edges of the cut, streaking down my leg and racing to my already red marred bed. I swore, blundering to my feet and grabbing a handful of torn tissues, eyes wide and terrified, because blood was conceived by my broken brain as an achievement above all else, that was not what I wanted, and oh fuck.
I pressed the processed material against the gash desperately, shocked and alarmed as the stark white immediately soaked through with vital red. Half a box was wasted in thirty seconds, and, crap, right, that wasn’t going to work.
I stumbled hysterically around my cluttered room, flimsy paper pressed tightly to my dangered hip, fingers threatening to be tinged with blood, searching for something to stop the red maining rivulets over my flesh. A pair of old boxers was pressed to the slash as I trembled, back pushed against the wall in the painful corner of my room, legs held out stiff and straight in front of me, arm pressing the fabric old sorely hard. I pulled it back cautiously, cursing and babbling to myself as the blood continued to fucking gush out.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I exclaimed, disrupting the crinkling quiet of the Sunday morning, whitewashed world blaring blindingly bright through the window next to me. “How the fuck do I make this stop?”
I rubbed the makeshift bandage back into my hip, choking in oxygen deeply and trying to calm myself the fuck down so I could rationally figure out what to do. Pressure. Right? That’s what you do to cuts that are uncontrollable: apply pressure.
With that observation in mind, I retrieved my phone with jittering limbs, watching the time tick by with one hand incapacitated at my side as the other scrolled through Twitter in a useless attempt to keep my mind occupied and prevent myself from full-out panicking. It failed – both the try at self-soothing and struggle to cease the spurting blood.
Ten minutes later, the previously gray underwear was halved shocking red, nearly a centimeter wide cut continuing to coloring my formerly white skin, my entire body was practically convulsing, and I had to somehow get ready to go to my freaking Grandma's termite-ridden house.
I shuffled to the bathroom with my erratic heart beating in my throat, taping gauze over the gash and praying to a God that I didn’t believe in that it would detain the seeping blood from my jeans, wiggling into my loosest pair of still annoyingly tight pants and an old, oversized Ravens hoodie, tugging a beanie over my regularly messy hair and attending the fucking family get together that unintentionally caused this bizzare mess. I spent the entire three hours faking grins and hysterically hoping that my internal panic and despondency would go unnoticed.
It did, and I wasn’t entirely positive that that was really what I wanted.
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Standing in the bathroom that gloomy night, splattering shower running in front of me, I tossed my giant shirt carelessly onto the dim marble counter and looked sadly at the white bandage on my hip, trying to figure out how to bathe without fucking bleeding out. I grabbed my phone, dejected, concluding that I had no one else to turn to and texting Alex, Hey, do you, by any chance, know how to make a cut stop bleeding?
Two minutes of me anxiously gnawing on my on my already raw lip and listening to the water splashing wastefully out of the shower head and onto the bumpy glass door later, my phone buzzed with a message. I swiped at the screen with trembling, scratched up hands, reading Alex’s reply with a hopeless sigh, Apply pressure to it. Press a tissue to it, don’t even pick it up to check if the bleeding stopped, just hold it in place for as long as possible. Tape same gauze to it if necessary, but don’t let it be uncovered.
That was, of course, exactly what I’d already done, and peeling the white away from my equally pale skin with a stressed wince revealed that all of my efforts had not worked at all. I really, really liked Alex, but I couldn’t help but be irritated by how useless his advice was. Not that it was fair of me to rely on him to get me out of that fucked up situation, but my rationale had stopped adhering to a level headed, sensible path months ago.
I decided to simply completely give up, flushing the useless bandages down the toilet and climbing into the startling spray, still oozing blood becoming diluted with water and washing down my thigh. I watched the red swirl down the grimy drain and pondered if this was what it looked like to those who harmed themselves in the shower, something that I’d never done – it stole some of the fun, the blood immediately getting cleansed away.
Thanks to either some divine intervention or physical normality, the cut stopped bleeding while I showered, getting burning shampoo in my already irritated eyes and almost inhaling lungfuls of water with my continued heavy breathing and broken metronome heart beating overtime. I dried off, covered it with half a box of Band-Aids, tugged on my loosest clothes, and collapsed in a lame attempt to sleep. Or, rather, laid down carefully on my left side, curled tightly around a lifeless pillow and stared blankly into the dark until my eyes were too tired to stay open, at which point I remained stuck in my mind until finally knocking off at close to one in the morning, alarm blaring me awake less than six hours later.
The cut took a bloody week to fully scab over and be reliable enough that I could take my boxers off without fear of it starting to seemingly evilly gush again. It was another month before the pink tissue was completely formed and I let myself fall asleep on either side, secure in the knowledge that my sheets wouldn’t be smeared red exactly where my hip had been in the harsh sunlight morning.
The scar was permanent.
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I'm slightly terrified that someone is going to read this and think 'Oh, cutting make Jack feel better, I should do that, that'll be fun' because that's a bit of what happened to me - where the inital curiosity came from - and I could never forgive myself for being the cause of that. So let me restate that Jack is the worst role model possible, do not ever do anything that he does (accept for with Alex; if you find an Alex, go for that) especially with this chapter. I know that there are people reading this who self harm, and I'm not going to try to tell you to stop, because it wouldn't work, but please, keep it manageable. Do not go deep enough that you can't stop the bleeding; when this happened, it was terrifying and stressful and horrible in absolutely every way. It made me feel far worse rather than better, and please, seriously, don't do it. If you're going to take anything I say in this story to heart, let it be this, and do not cut deeper than you can control. I feel like I should end this on a lighter note - best international band, how 'bout that? Please comment.
xoxo
Rose
P.S. We're just not going to talk about how it's technically Monday.