pb

------inspired by Xip's essay------

i think i started because i was so drained of emotion and felt like i still had something dangerous, something poison in me which needed extraction.

i continued because i liked the scabs.

because i was cold and drunk and boring...somehow razors and pain and oozing made me interesting to myself. human, intricate and mortal.

because, later, i hated everything i'd become, the place where i'd looked up from having my dick to the grindstone and realized i'd worked for all the wrong reasons toward an ill-defined goal, one which wasn't in the least valuable to me and even less to anyone else.

because someone liked to watch me do it, looked on with barely contained lust in her eyes as i drew lines in myself with commonplace, cast-off metal.

lusty, damaging, mortal, carnal, steeped in pain-mixed gratification, it became somehow analogous to sex, though more a sort of masturbation and foreplay rather than something done to or in concert with another.


-pb

book: carrie's game
music: joy division