Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

and bones falling half to the left and half to the right. I think of the girl I’d survived a car crash with fourteen years earlier while travelling – she’d been stuck with gauze from her throat to her belly button, the wound spitting and spurting underneath. I used to imagine what she looked like with the gauze lifted off, and now I see my head on her body.

I’m cut from chin to tummy, split open, right in half. The pain’s got teeth and chews a line from the inside out, spitting strips of flesh as it charges through me. When my body breaks, the only way I can put it back together, stitch it piece by piece, is with my own knife or any one of the razors and blades that I hold in my hands.

There isn’t a calmness when I try to carve myself whole again. I always begin in the eye of madness: knee-deep in despair, crying, heaving. After the first time that I place the blade against my skin, press and pull hard, everything gets quiet. My pulse slows. It throbs inside my skull. My breathing loses its rapid, dancing rhythm. My face becomes dry, my skin pulled tight with salt. I concentrate on what I’m doing. How much it hurts. How bad it feels. How good it feels. But I know it can feel better; it can feel worse. Each time it doesn’t hurt enough, or I don’t bleed enough, I cut more, harder, longer, deeper. Summoning more courage – and it feels like immense bravery – to hurt myself properly.

More often than not, I go too far. Blood flows faster than I can catch it, control it. The cut springs open with a width and depth I’m not prepared for. I stare into the valley inside and think I can see a place I can be happy. I fall asleep on a crashing crescendo wave of pure happiness. The endorphins released like noxious gas when silver blade pares skin, reveals pain. My limbs ache with the pain of being peeled with steel; the stinging, high-pitched and taut, runs all over my body. I sleep easier than I have in days, sometimes weeks.

When the sunlight stirs me hours later, I feel the pain before I’ve fully opened my eyes. Shame rises like morning-after vomit in my mouth. I can’t believe I did this again. It’s going to take weeks to heal. How do I hide it? I want to grab the arms of the clock and pull them back until it’s yesterday again and my skin is uncut. Panic gives way to practicalities as I work out how to bury myself in secrets.

Covering my cuts, burying my wounds becomes harder and harder. Plasters became gauze and tape and bandages. I take to wearing bracelets for the first time in a decade. Rows and rows of cheap plastic bangles, often worn up to my elbows. Stacked metal bracelets rub the cuts even more raw and sore. I put on long sleeves as the sun bears down. Barely scabbed cuts rub against the velvet, the polyester, the cotton. Opening up my arms means it hurts to sit at a table, with hands on the wooden surface. Opening up my legs means it hurts to sit completely still on a plastic chair, a cushioned chair, a sofa. When things are really bad it hurts to walk, to swing my arm in step. Each movement forwards, each forward motion provokes a rub, the sting of an open wound against fabric, snatching the breath from my mouth. I pick out the lint sticking inside the open red smiles with tweezers, knowing the metal will hit blood and nerves at some point and it will be all part of the punishment that I’ve come to deserve.

Then there’s the night it’s just not enough. No punishment is enough. There’s no way to put myself back together and I want to walk into oblivion, pulling everything in with me. I take the blade to my forearm, press harder than I have ever before, furious at my loneliness, my sadness, the cycle of my own pathetic misery. I let out a sob-strangled roar as I pull the razor across.

My skin falls open like a mango as it spoils. Blood spits and spurts. I pinch together the skin, trying to magically make it stick back together, trying to stop the red wave. I panic, not because I’m hurt more than I intended – though what did I intend? – but because I don’t want to go to the emergency room. I don’t want them to know what I have done, to have to wear that layer of shame on the outside. To bear the consequences of what happens when you turn up at hospital with cut arms and flowing blood on the outside, not the inside. Everything is held together by a thread. The whole house of cards comes tumbling down if anyone realises how sick I’ve become.

It stops bleeding eventually. I pack tissue inside the hole. I wear new gauze, which blood stains quickly. There’s no clothing which can cover what I’ve been doing. I wear dresses with short sleeves. No one asks me what I’ve done, how I injured myself, not here in New York.

When I go home to the UK they ask, alarmed: oh my God, what have you done? I tell them I caught my arm on a nail, tore it open as I pulled away. It’s the only story that seems vaguely believable. Though I’m pretty sure no one does, in fact, believe me.

July 2013: it’s the holiday weekend – a long weekend, with two whole days off work. I’m relieved, giddy. I meet a friend in Julius, the oldest operating gay bar in New York. The drinks – cocktails, vodka, whiskey, wine – slide down smoothly. I feed a line of dollar notes into the jukebox, selecting songs by Amy Winehouse, The Supremes and The Shangri-Las, before resting my