part two, a story, of sorts:
I look with satisfaction at the blood trickling down my arm. Feel hot wet warmth. Was pleased I had bothered to get a decent knife from the kitchen. Even though I despised myself for feeling pleased. I know that this is barely mutilation at all, just a few scratches. No need for stitches, barely any blood, really. The arm never bleeds enough. I thought of some of my friends' arms, the patina of silver lines, and wondered how they had done it. Determination, years of agony and confusion and turmoil and all the reasons and feelings. More feeling than I ever had in my useless being. I've never been as devoted to anything. Can't even make mutilation more than a fairweather hobby. What with the diabetes, my own blood has become something of a mundanity. Still I love it. The colour, the warmth, the taste. The thought of all those workings inside me, being so real, look, there, it's flowing, I must be here somehow, why else would it pulse like that? What could be more tangible?
I always get a strange feeling, of this intensity, when I'm on my period. To actually feel the lining sloughing away from me. This ineffable force from the inside out. This symbol of life and death. Think of women in concentration camps: the first thing to reassert itself when they were finally reasonably well nourished was their menstrual cycle. It's powerful and terrifying in a way, this genuine force for life. Transcendental to womanhood but so fucking real too, that smell of earth and iron. What do men get that comes close? The smell of napalm in the morning? Effortlessly it symbolises life; they summon up death.
I push the knife in again, but already I'm chickening out. The zeal of the first cut will never be echoed, it does still hurt, I'm not so far gone.
And I always seem to do this after weed, after him. Such a terrible set of reasons. But i never understood what was so different, really, between doing this and getting a tattoo. It's all mutilation. Both definitely hurt, which some people draw pleasure from. They try and take control of their bodies. It's just one costs a lot more. Except, for me, all I really want is too see the blood. It's that colour: there is nothing like it. I want to cut myself and watch it bead forth and flow and drip everywhere, wreck everything, soil it, stain it. From pricking my fingers for my blood sugar meter, there are spots of blood on most of my clothes, notebooks, sundry bits of my life forever branded. Out damn spot, show me something truer, show me what it really, really means to be bleeding. I can't divulge this fear, this hatred, all of these feelings, there aren't words. But there's my body: there's my blood. It can speak for me, dripping on the bedsheets now. And i'm daubing at it with a blue napkin, fascinated by the vibrance still. Oxygenated haemoglobin, plasma. Science unrivalled in it's beauty. I want more but my arm hurts. Pathetic. Blood doesn't protest in pain, it simply is, follows forces, does the heart's bidding, meets gravity, takes the shape of the pool that surrounds it. Doing the heart's bidding is probably what got me into this state. And now i want to see blood. So we're both slaves. Sisters in shame.
I put the knife down, push it away. Put my head down on the pillow, arm held rigid in front of me.
Tomorrow night. Maybe the other arm.
