Tarnished
Five long, elegantly carved wooden posts comprised the belly of the headboard, which crowned my mattress. All scared with chewing gum, accidents, and sleepless night terrors. Staring past those posts to the wallpaper beyond, I felt like a desperate little convict on the inside of a glorious, oak prison cell. Bread crumbs and backwash. Solitary confinement. Prints upon the paper just inches from my glances, spelled out secret passwords whick opened awkward entrances. the time seemed always night. It seemed endless next to a small AM radio that picked up foreign frequencies, which when listened to long enough, would speak my native tongue. And the thought danced there. It twirled around my head. Speech came soft as whispers within my parent's home.
A solitude so confining that even the very lonely could not comprehend its disquise. A nauseous desperation enveloped me like an acrid cocoon. This was home and the comfort there. This was maternal instinct. Parental love.
Sinking became a natural form of progression. An ever oozing down. A constant seeping through the floor boards. All becoming liquid and blood. Decay in the nectar. When my flesh cried out for attention, adrenaline heard the call. And still this was not sickness, or sadness at its core. It was fear.
The school library was an instinctual playground. I'd spent dream-like hours in a boiling pot of serial killers, mass murderers, mental disorder, and occult encyclopedias. It seemed sex was everywhere. It hung on the dusty shelves like ripe, forbidden fruit, begging to be plucked. I was drenched with an intense longing to be swept away. But not sex, nor murder, or even magic, was my vehicle. The journey turned its pathways against me. I, myself, became the treasure map. I remember when the real digging began.
I sought happiness, or at least a sense of calm. Night held me in secrecy as a strange, almost mesmerizing giddiness, overtook my thoughts. The bedroom was dimly lit by a small black and white television. My skin looked blue. Where or when, or even why I got the blade eludes me now, but I was holding a silver, fish-gutting knife. A current encircled me. My flesh was alive with electricity. My ears were deafened with an intoxicating hum. I began brushing the cool steel edge against my arm, until it was just the pointed tip grinding its way through the surface layers of skin. The shape of the blade, and the cocked angle with which it was held, caused a gradual opening in my forearm. It was more of a cavern than a gash. Blood escaped its swollen background, and I sat there with the grand sense of accomplishment achieved upon completing a task. Happy, almost proud, I slept soundly that night.
Cuts are not easily explained away. Almost anyone who sees a large, fresh wound on your body will ask how it happened. I began lying. I wore long sleeves, jeackets, gloves. Once I was called into the intermediate high school's counseling office. There was rumor that I might be victim of some abuse at home, which I denied. It all seemed almost hilarious to me. Years of anguish and mental torment go by unnoticed, and a few scabs gather inquest. Others began to worry about me, at a point when the membrane of my sorrow engulfed me as a womb. This gave birth to excitement. I no longer needed, nor desired the help of these people so very far away from me. They did not understand the different hues of pain, the intrinsic qualities of self infliction, or the energy pulling there. The sharpening of truth was mine alone, for years. And still this was not self-hatred, or self destruction at its core. It was a process.
In the beginning, I cut myself almost every night. It was medicinal. Periods of deep, stealing heartache, would be followed by bloodshed. The act of dragging various sharp objects through my skin, took my otherwise abstract and expansive discontent, and focused it. Other thoughts spilled away as I sketched these designs. I felt stronger, less afraid, without a concrete understanding of exactly why. Isolation coveted me like a disgruntled lover. I distanced myself from everyone on a personal level. Few understood my behavior, and I think I liked it that way. There were those who found my wounds repulsive. Some couldn't see them at all. At times, I was grabbed physically and interrogated on the spot. I remember once, my father took me by the wrist and threw me into the garage. He sat me down on a diirty fold-out chair and walked over to his tool box. He came back with an open, brass, Buck knife, and pressed it up against my right arm. "If you want to feel pain, young lady, I'll show you pain! What the hell is wrong with you? You're acting like a god damned kook!" He ranted on for "my benefit", teased me with the knife a little, then walked out disgusted. I guess he thought he cured me. Not everybody disapproved though. Some respected my privacy. Others accepted my reasoning. A few even engaged in similar practices. I now had some friends. Soul mates.
It seemed I had broken through a shell, and was at last free to grow in understanding of myself. Life was taking a very fleshy turn, Sex came riding in on a greyhound, carrying with it a wind of contamination. My self-infliction would never be the same again. The turn it took was crooked. I am still not straight. I prostituted my will power in the name of "love". An open crevice, wanting the world into its center. Crisscross the slip knot atop a seductive pool of nectar. Decay in the blood. And still this was no ocean or fluid at its core. It was a shipwreck.
Blood would become a ritual, done in rememberance. Shed out of heartbreak. Soaked with regret. Stinking with fear. Punishment. It was a mistake. I began to vanpirise my own energy. Prey became predator. Predator pray. Cupid left teeth marks on my wanton writs. I sought to go hiding. Finding anything I could to satiate my need for emotional chaos. Smoke and mirrors in a gynecological landscape. A murderer's recollection of the truth. I used men as razors for several years. With their poking and prodding and pulling apart. Their pushing and punching. An incessant tear with its microscopic desease and overwhelming weight. Demons on the war path beneath a banner of lust. Molesting my will. The world swelled shut to the size of a man and a thousand little scars.
One morning in a post-drunken haze, upon attempting to rise, my pillow pulled briefly up with my arms and chest. Then it dropped back down the the mattress with the sensation of a tear across my upper body. The pillow was covered in blood. A smear of what once was me. I looked at myself and there were gashes everywhere. Slashes and openings trailing my skin like a road map. Nothing but defeat coursed through my struggling veins that morning. The poison of immanent disaster plagued me. Weakness had my senses in bondage. I did not see it. I couldn't. This was sickness, it was destruction at its core, and it was killing me.
I am always aware of my skin. It weighs on my mind like an implulse. Imprinted with memory. It enwraps me like a stranger, commanding its own will. I fall beneath the ache of its silence with a bloody retribution. It screams out in essence through that which is caged. This prison with its fleshy bars. Sometimes I'm stopped and interrogated on the spot... On the night I got arrested, I was tucked neatly into the back seat of a police car. Filling out some forms, the officer on the passenger's side asked me if I had any distinguishing marks or scars: for the record. It seemed almost hilarious to me. On the way to a blood test, bound to fail.
Posted 1/17/02 |
