Let me glimpse inside your velvet bones.

Edgar Allen Poe, The Collected Letters 

It has been months since I have felt the urge to write anything at all. This should not surprise me: my life has been a half-defined hellscape of burials and burning eyes, or dim evening flights back to those who have ruined me. Where has my mind gone since? My body moves like Orphean music and I see glimpses of a self in glass panes. How changed I am.

Where once I stood inexpressible, half-starved, all eyes and prominent ridges of bone, I now see a woman. Nothing more. I am heavier now, almost as heavy I used to be in childhood, my countenance always exhausted, or expressionless. The ink on my skin falls differently, for the curves of my body have altered. It is not unlovely, no, but certainly unfamiliar: this spray of flowers across the flesh, these living, growing memories of a wound.

But the scars, the scars look different: the new ones are thick and sinewy, they draw my eyes and mottle my arms. Every time someone asks after them, I am mutilated anew. The cuts crack fresh open, like trauma, like a birth. They used to fade so softly beneath the new skin, like barefoot impressions on alabaster shores, like constellations fading with the silver of dawn. But these ones will stay. I cannot outlive them. Someone turned the knife too deep. 

Where once I was all love and affection and gratitude, a child still seeking solace, now I am colder than ice. I really do feel hatred. This is worse than anger, and yet, less personal: this is the pure acrimony of contempt, of disdain unmarred by remorse or even personal affront. I am finally learning what I so long professed a desire to know. How to walk “carefully, precariously”: I carry myself like something rare. I feel nothing but precise, controlled disgust. There is no sorrow. I have suffered no loss. 

I have only really known three people, so far, who have looked at me like the most beautiful thing in the world. The first of them was a catalyst: the worst was the last. It still sickens me, to watch that razor-edged frame. Shall we talk of rapture or raptor talons, of jaws or viper’s tongues? That sickness that devours each of us from within, unfeeling, flesh-eating, was only an echo of what she was capable of. She watched them tear me apart, watch me tear myself apart, and she fed on that, when I never could. Her tongue and her voice sicken me now: that I ever succumbed to such infected neglect. What must it feel like, to wield the vices of apathy, of self-vindication, of carelessness? Avarice and artifice, the audacity to feign some normalcy: the very sight of her spreads like a cancer across my form. The sound of your breath sparks the ceasing of mine. I could not starve myself long enough to expunge the toxins of your cowardice, your skin. Your heart, your mouth, like a Janus you were halved, and I hate you for it–someday, you will know this feeling. You will. 

But here is the beauty of the thing. You think you know who I am writing about. You, love, think you know who you are. You are mistaken. You are blinder than the narcissi. You are not the woman of whom I now write. This is not about you. It was never about you. You aren’t you. You’re an absence. You’re a wound. You aren’t. No one knows who I write of now. You’ve never met her. Not one of you.

And so I am clean. Amazingly, unfathomably, I am clean. Not unscathed, of course, but finally, finally, I am something close to blameless. Because it was not me after all, they all just kept on dying without me. I am not like them. I am entering into existence again: like an iris, the lid unfolds. I am in pain, I suffer beneath their eyes and lingering accusations, but I am deeply alive. And I don’t self harm anymore.

I do not mutilate my own body because I will not make the job easier for them–for anyone who wants to see me sick or scared or hopeless. I don’t cut. I don’t burn my skin. I don’t medicate beyond recompense, don’t drink to kill, don’t take risks chasing worthless shadows of affection. I used to think that to undo myself was to find a way out. To be impaled upon the living world. To be heard and found and saved. But I know better now. I know how little this life cares, I know that if I continued to carve the cruelty of others into my skin, I would only waste away in some room somewhere, friendless and purposeless and alone. No one will ever save me, and seldom will they even choose to stay. I have been taught the lesson too many times. I need not learn it again.

There are people who want me gone, who do not care either way, who would rather spare themselves the trouble of my existence. I will not make their lot any easier. I will not comply. Instead, I live. Absurdly, I live. Out of pure, undesirable spite, I still live. 

I don’t self harm because when they left me, they took that part of me with them. Just look at me now. I think I died sometime along the way. Dead in the beginning. Did not die when I should have. I lost my father, my lover, my best friends, my could-have-been brother, my purpose, my memory, my pride. I’ve felt blood expunged like life from between my legs (or was it the other way around?) and I’ve seen the underside of a mind that was my grave. One after another, they picked like vultures at my rotting flesh. But the mutilated mass they all left there, sliced and shivering, had not yet submitted entirely. 

Consider me in what fashion you will. But whatever clambered from my corpse is still living beside you, I see it in the mirror when I stare and I stare. Asphodel burns away, with thorns and Irish roses: my funeral rites. I am flint, I am ash, I am cypress and bone.

I am the child of a possibility long since passed. They buried my hope with his body. They only left this carcass: a seraph fallen to earth on the knife’s edge. My mind is smoke and diamond, and that thing in my chest, the burning core that nearly killed me, the writhing darkness I once exhaled with all my willful, wild ways–it no longer howls. It knows me. I welcome it. We are one.

Apathy and loathing, I waver between the two like a detuned radio, and contempt is the closest thing to love that I know. Sometimes I still feel the dark glamour of desire: the woman with the water streaming through her opal hair, the figures flickering on my periphery, who were kind to me, who kept me from worse than dying, who are trying to care. But it hardly matters anymore. 

I am no longer afraid of solitude. I am not afraid of being denied love. I have faced both and found my breath again. I have buried the people I cared for. I have bruised my own heart and fractured my mind against the unending question, where did they go, why did they leave, why will they not answer, why—

It has all passed through me like memory through a living mind. These things cannot hurt me anymore, because I cannot make myself love the way I used to. I will never feel that way again, and so will never open my own skin to see pale blue capillaries or crimson rain-showers or dazzling prisms of light. Farewell, the lovely promises. I do not self harm because there is no longer anything or anyone worth harming myself for. There never really was.