naiya

'Somewhere over the course of that winter I started thinking about killing myself, though not so much because I wanted to be dead, precisely, As because I yearned for resolution, for escape from the scratching distress of now. I thought killing myself was the only way I'd get that. Somehow, I wasn't really picturing the long term consequences of being dead. That I'd be dead now, dead later, and the dead ad infitintum. I was looking at dead in the short term. Dead until maybe, say, it was time to go to college.
Would I really have killed myself? I don't know. I was sceptical enough even then about my theatrical streak to suspect that suicide might be just another piece of that performance. Slit your wrists in the bathtub where the warm water makes it easier, I'd heard. The plinking drip from the faucet. The billow of red clouding the water against the bone white of the tub. I could see it all just a little too cinematically, a movie starring the soon to be tragically regretted third-person Caroline.
I needed to kill something in me, this awful feeling like worms tunnelling along my nerves. So when I discovered the razorblade, cutting, if you'll believe me, was my gesture of hope. That first time, when I was twelve, was like some kind of miracle, a revelation. The blade slipped easily, painlessly through my kin, like a hot knife through butter. As swift and pure as a stroke of lightning, it wrought an absolute and pristine division between before and after. All the chaos, the soun and the fury, the uncertainty and confusion and despair -all of it evaporated in an instant, and I was for that moment grounded, coherent, whole. Here is the irreducible self. I drew the line in the sand, marked my body as mine, its flesh and its blood under my command.'

Skin Game