How many cuts could I count? How many could I place in time and context? I had to admit that I couldn’t remember the occasion of almost any of them, their catalysts, whether epic or mundane, completely obscured by time. So many moments of supposedly unendurable pain, now utterly forgotten. You start to think, Maybe I don’t need this anymore. Maybe I never did.

I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting; that’s the plain and inelegant truth. No matter how compelling the urge, the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the urge, but the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the flood tide of emotions that drove me to that brink, but I had the power to decide whether or not to step over. Eventually I decided not to. Read more »

I let the razor's edge kiss the pale skin near my left elbow, and then drew it slowly - so slowly that I could feel through the blade the faintest tug of resistance and the sudden giving way of the flesh - along my arm. There was a very fine, an elegant pain, hardly a pain at all, like the swift and fleeting burn of a drop of hot candle wax. In the razor's wake, the skin melted away, parted to show briefly the milky white subcutaneous layers before a thin, beaded line of rich crimson blood seeped through the inch-long divide. Then the blood welled up and began to distort the pure, stark edges of my delicately wrought wound.

The chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence. I had distilled myself to the immediacy of hand, blade, blood, flesh.

I had to know it now, how this blade would sing its own clean note upon my skin. Only once, I said to myself. Then only once more, because yes, how fine was the swift flicker of its passage! The perfect congress of skin and blade, and the elegant, industrial-age precision of the cut. Like the letting-go of a long-held breath, like the first deep draught of cool water on a parched throat.