it's been a long while since i went a day without eating.

but i remember.
there was a time when the universe couldn't be distilled enough.

when even my writing abandoned me, when my emotions flew tidal circles without my consent, and i was numbly horrified by the world and my place in it.

i was in love. the first, headlong love that felt like stepping blindly into a vacuum. our lives had spiraled into each other, a desperate tangling despite wildly different roots. he was three years older; he lived three hours away.

i never cut myself.
not with anything sharp.
i tried to scrape control out of my flesh with my bare hands, fingernails rending little curlicues of skin and eventually, occasionally finding blood to mix in the hot shower water. little jagged lines that followed the curve of my hipbone, where they would be hidden even in the tootight racing suits.

swimming until my muscles screamed, until i limped all the next day.

and sitting quietly through lunch and the traditional stop at subway for interminable sandwiches, easing around dinner with the excuse of an upset stomach, laying in bed knowing that i'd done something. knowing that, this time, it was my choice and my actions and the gnawing in my stomach was of no one's doing but my own.

all of my poetry was melodrama.

i only stopped when the challenge began to lie in avoiding these things, rather than doing them. the test of will was reversed, and i ate because i didn't want to, my skin healed soft and scarless because i wanted it torn.
later, with time and larger choices, with a few slaps to the psyche and one terrifying burst of irrevocable rage, the desire to remove my skin was sublimated into a desire to remove my hair. not trim it, not cut it, but erase it. all of it, and everything i decided it stood for.
i still stood in the mirror holding a razor, but hair doesn't bleed.

there are days still that i wonder if i could do it.

and all of it, always, was backed, propelled, by the thought that i had no right.
no right to ache, no right to complain, no right, in the face of all the pain of those i loved, to hurt myself on purpose. it was guilt and shame and anger, helplessness and distance and thwarted desire, more shadows and slices of emotion than i've ever had the words to name.

there was a later boyfriend who dryly smirked and informed me that yes, he did know how long it takes chewedshort nails to rip through flesh. i think he was trying to sympathize.


i'm not saying i understand. i know i haven't been there... but in a way, all those shuteyed towns are the same, and i hope you find your road out.