Cutting

 I have been asked countless times what I feel when I cut myself.

I can't really explain it well. Maybe I should say that I, undoubtedly, experiment a certain relief, like a weight has been lifted off my chest and I can finally breathe. Blood purifies me. It hurts, but at the same time it's comforting.

When a child knows he's done something wrong, it is preferrable for him the punishment or the screams rather than the simple anguish of his parents' silence, of the disappointment he knows or senses they feel. Through punishment, guilt is vanished.

There is no punishment that can erase my guilt, but it certainly helps, As of late, I recurrently dream (and if I close my eyes while being awake, I can also see it) that I see, in front of a mirror, how I slowly remove my buttoned shirt, and, as I open the fastenings, hundreds of tiny, deep, red cuts are revealed in what was the skin of my chest and my womb, my breasts, my neck, my shoulders and my arms, all the way down to my hips. As I breathe in, the wounds open and close like small mouths in a scarlet shade, asking for who knows what, like starving chicks on a nest... and the nest is my body, off of which they feed.

This fantasy assails me constantly. Yet I know I cannot destroy my body without people noticing, andI don't want anyone to know, especially my father. Sometimes I come to think that, unconsciously, I want to be caught, that I want to be humiliated that way. Isn't shame what this is all about? It is out of shame that I scrub my body until my pores bleed. It is out of shame that I force myself to bathe in water so hot it's almost burning, like that could finally cleanse me, as if it would purify me. As I said before, purification is also a good deal of it.

There's also this thing about me being able to sleep better only after I cut myself. Honestly, it works better than any drug I've been prescripted. Sometimes, I take out my favorite badge's needle and hammer it into my legs because I feel my skin is dirty, that it is corrupted, that it is impure. It's as if bleeding could erase the burning prints of 'his' hands, 'his' abhorred hands, over this body I loathe.

I want to destroy my body so that 'he' can't posess it. I want to break free of this prison to which I have been confined. I want... I don't know... to receive a punishment so great it can purge my soul.

That's more or less how I feel.