OUT. CUT IT ALL OUT. Cut out my father. Cut out my mother. Cut out missing Ellis. Cut out the man in the underpass, cut out Fucking Frank, the men downstairs, the people on the street with too many people inside them, cut out hungry, and sad and tired, and being nobody and unpretty and unloved, just cut it all out, get smaller and smaller until I was nothing.
That’s what was in my head in the attic when I took broken glass from my tender kit and began to cut myself into tiny pieces. I’d done it forever, for years, but now would be the last time. I’d go farther than Ellis had. Wouldn’t fuck it up like Ellis had: I would die, not end up in some half-life.
That time, I tried so hard to fucking die.
But here I am.
Sayfa 45Kitabı okudu
In Group, Casper doesn’t like us to say cut or cutting or burn or stab. She says it doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it: it’s all the same. You could drink, slice, do meth, snort coke, burn, cut, stab, slash, rip out your eyelashes, or fuck till you bleed and it’s all the same thing: self-harm. She says: whether someone has hurt you or made you feel bad or unworthy or unclean, rather than taking the rational step of realizing that person is an asshole or a psycho and should be shot or strung up and you should stay the fuck away from them, instead we internalize our abuse and begin to blame and punish ourselves and weirdly, once you start cutting or burning or fucking because you feel so shitty and unworthy, your body starts to release this neat-feeling shit called endorphins and you feel so fucking high the world is like cotton candy at the best and most colorful state fair in the world, only bloody and stuffed with infection. But the fucked-up part is once you start self-harming, you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a girl, nobody will love that, and so all of us, every one, is screwed, inside and out. Wash, rinse, fucking repeat.
Sayfa 38Kitabı okudu
My father could walk for hours. He said, “I just want it to be quiet.” And we walked and walked, looking for that quiet place. The forest is not as quiet as everyone thinks.
Sayfa 35Kitabı okudu
I write down what it feels like and push the paper across Casper’s desk. My body is on fire all the time, burning me away day and night. I have to cut the black heat out. When I clean myself, wash and mend, I feel better. Cooler inside and calm. Like moss feels, when you get far back in the woods. What I don’t write is: I’m so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed, just like my father.
Sayfa 34Kitabı okudu
and sometimes I miss my mother, even though missing her feels more like anger than sadness, like I feel when I think about Ellis, and even that, really, isn’t true, because while I say sadness what I really mean is black hole inside me filled with nails and rocks and broken glass and the words I don’t have anymore.
Sayfa 27Kitabı okudu