In seattle, hairy legs are somewhat acceptable. The rainbow sister ideology is intrinsic to life in the Pacific Northwest. Smatterings can be found in even the most ghoulish of Goth communities. It doesn't really mean anything to have unshaven legs. No one asks if you're "from Europe" or reminds you that "Jerry's dead, fer chrissakes." I grew up in California. The beach was a huge part of my life and I shaved accordingly. I stopped shaving when I went to college in Olympia. It kinda rankled that men didn't have to bother with this extensive task de toilette, but I didn't keep hairy for feminism. I had nothing to protest.

I had something to hide.

My leg hairs aren't dark, but they create a vertical field, obstructing the deep horizontal slash scars on my calves and thighs. It wasn't until I moved back to California that I started getting the European and Jerry's dead comments. This didn't remotely inspire me to consider shaving my legs, but it did force me to admit that I hid behind my unshaven state. In Washington, it was a nonissue. I never had to face my motives. Then I had a lovergirl with a serious aversion to body hair. No one ever asked me to shave before. I could've easily refused, and she probably would've fucked me all the same, but it seemed time to start facing what I'd done to myself.

The scars are deep. Some of them should have had stitches, but I was the only one who tended to my wounds.

I can't pinpoint when it started. The need simply arose. It's hard to write about this.

Deep breath.

During my first year of college, my little brother was killed in a car wreck. It was almost 10 years ago, and this is still just very difficult. One day, he was beautiful and surfing and 16, cracking me up on the phone with his demented sense of humor. The next day he was gone forever. There was no negotiating.

I screamed and pleaded to God with all my will to please fix his broken neck, to please make a signal on the EKG scanner, to please, please, please not take this precious human being away from me-from my mother, oh God, my mother, from my brother, my sister, my grandmother. Prettyprettypretty please. I'll do anything. Sell my soul. I'll never fuck up again as long as I live. I'll take a vow of poverty, silence, whatever, just please don't take this boy off the planet.

Pretty please.

And none of this changed the EKG scanner or mended his neck.

I went home and had to see my mother's face. Had to look into her eyes. Yes. Went to his memorial service. Closed casket. His pretty face ravaged beyond recognition by glass and impact.

It wasn't like he had AIDS or went to war. I had no time to brace myself for this loss.

I went back to school and applied myself like a MENSA gal. Woke up every morning and, I dunno, kept doing that. But the silence of him being gone killed me inside, and I couldn't keep living being killed inside every waking moment, so I went numb. It took almost a year for the numbness to ebb. And when I started feeling again, when I rose out of my reading lists, lectures, and essays, the pain was positively unbearable. No one in my community knew my brother. No one knew the precious jewel I lost forever. Having no frame of reference for despair of this nature, I certainly wasn't equipped to communicate. It started with incense. I lit incense to my brother everyday, and once I put the ember to my breast, where my demolished heart still evidently beat in my chest.

It felt good. The pain of my searing flesh felt better than anything I had known in months and months. I didn't touch the ember to my skin. I held it there, breathing deep and happy. And it wasn't just the burning that felt good, I loved watching the hole heal. I started in on my arms, the nape of my neck. I burned holes in myself almost every day and tended them like a garden. Some were hours old, some were scabbed over, some were healed completely. I washed them and kept them clean.

And I don't remember the first time I cut myself, but I do remember some car window glass laying in the gutter. I was walking home from school and saw all this glass. I stood and stared at it for a long time, and you know what, I have never made the connection between the car wreck that killed my brother and the car glass in the street until this very moment. I was so transfixed by it. On a sunny day after lots of rain, the glass was wet and caught the light in a billion shining starlets. Probably, that's what put glass into my mind. I started saving broken glass; kept it in this big clear round glass bowl in my refrigerator. The refrigerator was the most logical place to keep this miniature shrine.

Outside of my belief that metal was "dirty" and not something I would ever cut myself with, there were no dicta in cutting. When I hurt, I cut. Sometimes I did not hurt for a few weeks, and sometimes I hurt for days and days. When I hurt, I cried and when I cried, I picked a nice shard out of the refrigerator, sat on kitchen floor and sliced. Savagely. Once, I cut to the arm bone. I sliced and sliced until I sat in a pool of blood and stopped crying. I do not remember the pain ever being as bad as the pain I was living with, which isn't to say it never hurt. I bound the cuts in cotton cloth and wore pants and long sleeves.

Only two of my friends knew I did this to myself, and neither of them were ignorant enough to try to talk me out of it. They trusted my judgment and respected the fact that I had to make myself bleed if I wanted to stay alive and sane. I know it sounds like I was insane at this time, but I wasn't at all. I knew perfectly well what I was doing. I was fighting for my life. One friend did venture to ask me why I cut and burned my body. My response was lucid and succinct: "I need to know that I have the ability to heal. I need consistent, tangible evidence that my physical body will heal." That way, I knew my heart would heal, I knew one day I would be all right again. I knew my family would be all right again. I had to believe in something, and after my brother was ruthlessly snagged off the planet, belief was a very, very rare commodity in my life.

My motivation for writing this is not to advocate cutting and burning. Partly, I am motivated by a few articles I've seen on the "phenomena" of cutting. I guess people are starting to realize that it is something quite a number of people (mostly women) do. It's becoming something to "study," and the articles I've seen have been presented as if "cutters" are fucked up, self-destructive individuals who are crying out for help. From my own experience and from what I know of other people who have (or do) cut themselves, nothing could be farther from the truth. There was no amount of "grief therapy" that would have helped me survive my brother's death. I went to therapy, and was profoundly unable to express my grief. It wasn't until my brother had been dead for five years that therapy was a viable recourse. Cutting myself was a primal response to one of the most primal of human experiences: total, irrevocable loss.

Cutting and burning made it so I could deal with my day-to-day life for a time, and when I didn't need to bleed anymore, I stopped.

There have been a few times since I stopped that I've had to talk myself out of dealing with my pain by slicing myself up. This is not terribly difficult for me because the scars on my legs (the ones on my arms are neither as gruesome nor as obviously self-inflicted) are a constant reminder of how much I have grown and healed. I've since found positively hundreds of ways to deal with my pain. I jog for two hours and rant until I am breathless. I scream and scream in the forest. I go to isolated places and throw my shoes against a wall until my arms ache.

I do not like people to touch my scars. There are stabs in my heart when my scars are touched, even when I am the one who touches them.

And sometimes, once every coupla months, I shave my legs. I still hate it when people stare at my scars and ask me what happened. I mean, come on, it's totally fucking obvious that there is no way someone could have accidentally achieved these kinds of scar patterns on both sides of both legs. Possibly, I am defensive, but I feel like people gain some smug satisfaction in hearing me say I did it to myself, which always leads me to remembering those times I sat in my blood on the kitchen floor. I resent total strangers in a restaurant inspiring me to remember that deeply personal anguish, just because they want to self-righteously raise their eyebrows at me. But I'm learning to make up fantastic stories instead of hiding behind hairy rainbow sister legs:

"I fell in the grizzly bear enclosure at the zoo when I was eight." "Piranhas. It was horrible."

"Oh, those. Yeah, it was really weird. I dreamed I was Jesus, carrying the cross and these people were lashing at my legs with barbed whips. When I woke up in the morning, I had all these perfectly healed scars. Freak out on that, huh?"

Or, perhaps most truthfully of all, "It's from the time I escaped from a maximum security prison."

When your whole world comes crashing down in little tiny pieces and you know there's no way to put it back together the way it was, and you're gonna hafta reconstruct your heart, and your entire way of viewing the world and yourself in it, you hafta have something to rely on. Booze, drugs, and denial were never options for me. I have scars on the outside of my body, but I am glad they are there where I can see them and learn from them instead of buried deep inside me, never to be reckoned with.

Maybe that is why some people can't restrain themselves from asking me about my scars. Maybe it makes them feel like they don't have any.

But you know what, I bet they do.