Slit Wrist Theory

Ever put the blade to your skin? I have. It’s nothing glamorous. Takes a huge amount of courage just to raise it in your hand and bring it down close to the veins. The sheer willpower that it takes to graze your skin with it and the lunatic desperation to pierce deep will intimidate any weakling.

It’s not dramatic like they show in the movies or portray in the novels. The simplicity of the instance when the razor cuts through your skin is soul crushing. Yet, the resolve it takes to carry out self-infliction is terrifying. There's something good about it. Mostly, it makes me stop reminiscing.

Sadly, my reasons behind the act were awfully pathetic. Although my measures are beyond the pale, it’s a battle that I have to fight. Now that I think of it, I hear my conscience ask me, “To what end?”, and the answer ‘nothing’ seems dreadfully pitiable. Nevertheless, I have no regrets about it. The scars give me strength to go on, and are a constant reminder of the stark reality, which I cannot escape anymore because it is staring me right in the face.

The tiny scars refuse to fade away and have become my dark companions. They keep me sane. Mind, I am not demented or spurred on by any suicidal tendencies. I just get consumed by an explicitly unmistakable urge to hurt myself by way of atonement. I am too big a coward for that. There is no way in hell that I would ever end my own life. Besides, despite everything I am too addicted to the wonders, the sights, smells, and sounds of this world to throw it all away. Death is not my goal. I have found a way to survive.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways… I etched thirteen cuts into my wrist, the first time around only. For you, a hundred times over... That number itself is an omen of misfortune, even more importantly the date that marks you. Ironic, isn’t it? Did your coming into my life taint me? I cannot say. But of one thing I am sure is that when you left, you left a ghost of my former self behind and too frail a one.

A symbolic carving that will never let me forget the wounds. I remember the moments after I had made the gashes, the razor dropping from my trembling hands, the blood oozing thick as the gaping cuts gawked back at me. The tears streaming down my face in synchronization with the blood trickling down my arm. And in the depths of my despair, all I could hear was your voice, those cruel lies. I collapsed onto the floor in a sad heap, with my slashed wrist laid in front of my eyes and watched the rivulets of blood flow and form a small pool on the ground… I kept trying to quell the pain but waves of memories kept hitting me, the heartrending fragments of my life, knocking me senseless.

Afterwards, when it was done, it was just too much, and I felt like I was going to... I don't know.... explode, because it was all too much, I had to let it out, you know? I just had to.

It’s all about finding some worth within yourself, knowing that you have the nerve to do it, and knowing that not everyone can. And it’s also, I believe, linked to the fact I feel like that I do not matter, that I am inconsequential. And that even if I could express myself nobody would be there to listen anyway. The pandemonium within me, there’s no other way to get rid of it.

The second time around, when I cut myself I didn’t feel anything, not a thing. I was ultra-numb. Just put myself to perfunctorily making incision after incision with a ragged-edge razor, while singing a song that makes you slit your wrists:

So I swore to the razor,

That never enchained,

Would your dark nails of faith

Be pushed through my veins again…

I went on about lacerating myself like I am deranged; numbering each lesion. Closed my eyes and pretended that I was playing violin on my arm, only in the musical bow’s place I used the blade that made the blood gush out. And I sat there charmed, instead of agonizing as my veins poured out crimson lamentations, because racing through them is a higher level of pain than that could ever be felt with physical injury.

As the poignant melody of the screams in my head gradually progressed from a marcato to reach a crescendo, I halted the slicing on the accursed figure of thirteen; behind each incision, a memory, a thought… a curse. When you are deadened inside, you finally grasp that there is nothing more intense than the mental misery you dispense.

When the pain starts to make you feel alive you know you have crossed the line to no return. You didn’t want to listen to me anymore so I took up a silent pursuit: bleeding. Once you get into the habit of it nothing can then interrupt the hysteria.

It is transcendently gratifying to cut myself and bleed. On those lifeless days when the light looks no different from the shadows, and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen, and I am throwing my life away... And then there is this wicked red, the most dazzling thing in the day, so vibrant it pulses with life, this blood of mine. Which is okay because at least I know I am alive. It's an irrefutable, undeniable proof. Sometimes, I just need an aide memoire.

I wish, truly wish, that I could say all that I want to. But hurting myself is so much easier. At times, I look at my scars and see a perfect pattern of crisscrossed scars athwart adorn my wrist, some old and faded, others more recent and raw in diverse shades of red, leaving wet tracks across my skin. Revealing the trauma underneath the façade.

These scars lay bare my pain and affliction, but they also corroborate my will to survive. They are a part of me, and will always be here. I bleed after all, and the pain fetches me back to the here and now.

The third time, I tore open my wrist up with my bare nails. Envision your perception of normalcy; now put that thought in paradox, that is the fanatical level of sadism needed to tear at your own skin. At that juncture, my hands were all but talons, with which I clawed frantically at myself, digging in deeper, breaking nails in the raw sinews, until my very life dripped down my arms, painting my world scarlet. I was beyond redemption in those insane hours, and the girl I once had been was long dead and gone.  

The slit wrist theory stains me. I don’t resort to self-injury merely under severe angst, because once I crossed that line the first time, took that crucial step off the precipice, then nearly any reason was a good enough reason, almost any provocation was provocation enough. Cutting became a sweeping way out, the only remedy.

When the blade is almost piercing your skin, you find that a whole world lies between that moment and the moment that you contemplated the idea of actually doing it. And that world is what defeats you. The blinding rush of pain. You can’t live for very long without a heart, without feeling anything. Each cut is in its own profoundly private, enigmatic, and tragic; the last and best of bad possibilities.

Someone said, “the thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night”, I forget who, but it fills me with inspiration. Unquestionably, not because death seems suddenly appealing but because I need a diversion, a last resort if everything else fails. For when woe reaches a certain insufferable degree you break, and the cracks begin to show. You have to have stepped beyond the periphery of sanity to really have a handle on consenting to a slow bleeding of the soul.

By now, I have tempted the fate between my wrist and the razor plenty of times. I do it sporadically, and it doesn’t hurt me anymore, doesn’t scare me. I actually look forward to it as it is a sort of escape hatch for me, from the vagaries and let downs littering my life. I don't want to die; I just need to get it out somehow, all the pain. There’s chaos in my head and a furor in my heart, that a physical outlet, physical pain is the only way to make the pain go away. It is the only way I can live now. I will stop once I have made my veins weep a hundred and thirteen times, so I can all but crawl through blood to you, your name engraved in my very flesh, with the blade I still ache to use…

Let this love be my shroud…

And the web of your betrayal, lies, infidelity,

and apathy be strewn over my coffin…

The more I love you, the more I hate you; ergo, the more I am miserable, the more I harm myself. It is a vicious cycle.

Somehow, when I cut myself it is peculiarly liberating. How much anguish should equal a valid reason for self-harm? And how monumental must this anguish be? I do it for the reason that the alternatives are worse.

When the blade and the damage is done, what remains is a sordid twist of fate, the tattered remains of a warped, bitter, ugly mind. You can get addicted to a certain kind of pain, like bleeding to oblivion, always the oblivion; so that your self-affliction never fades. There is no killer for the pain. It’s like a slow-motion suicide, where each tourniquet collides so that you bleed to death little by little, writhing in pain. Until then happiness is like ecstasy, except I am cutting my wrist and bleeding instead of being in raptures.