I sit on my bed… I've been here before. The clouding of consciousness, the narrowing of my mind; all I can think about is getting up, getting my vintage Wordsworth book of poetry, opening it to page 234, the page I hide my razor in, and running it’s cold steel edge across my blemishing, deserving skin. It’s blemishing because it knows what’s coming. It’s become a compulsion. It’s as if me and the razor have developed a twisted kind of rapport, it speaks to me, calls to me, chants to me, tempts me, with the promise of salvation - and only I can hear it. All other thoughts are expelled. I’m becoming irritated and restless. “Why must I feel like this?” “Why can’t it just f*ing stop?!” I think to myself. My eyes burning and scratching from the inside out, tears fighting their way through the soft layers of retina and cornea until they collect around my stinging, rheumy eyelids. The world blurs into a collage of streaming lights and rippling surfaces as I’m slowly enveloped and trapped behind the looking glass. “All I want is for the pain to go the f*** away!” I scream in my mind, so loud that my cranium cripples with a pang of pressurized pain. Or do I? Do I really want the pain to go away? To disappear? Buried deep within my mind, In the subterranean depths of my subconscious, I know what the answer is. And it’s buried for a reason. “No, I don’t want the pain to go away.” It’s become my - my friend, my only real friend. It’s all I know. I wouldn't know what do, or who I’d be without it. It’s forged me; I am my pain. Without it I am nothing. What do you do when the thing that makes you you disappears? Vanishes? You become what you fear most. You become free. You shed the bondages of pain, of suffering, of your past, and you become free. And freedom is a terrifying thing:  Because what do you do when there is no longer anything dictating to you what you must do? What do you conform to when there is no longer any standard of conformity? Where do you go to hide when the only place you ever knew has been destroyed? You’re left vulnerable. Exposed. Naked. A single tear detaches from the salty reservoir in my eyes and makes the long, lonely journey down my cheek. It’s warmth feels welcome against my frigid skin. I can feel the trail of the tear, the salt has left my skin feeling tight and itchy.
     I try to think about something, anything, that isn't related to what I’m feeling. But every time I try to divert my thoughts they tighten their vice upon my mind-- squeezing me, crushing me in the puissant grip-- and in turn, I grab and dig my nails into the tender underbelly of my forearm. The more the the vice squeezes, the more I squeeze. It’s a game. A debased, sick, perverted game. And it’s the only game I know. My skin gives up it’s noble struggle and my nails pierce the layer that separates me from my salvation. The agony is everything that I expect and more. I can feel the warmth of the blood as it encroaches my fingertips, it pulses out of the wounds and trickles down my arm, slowly rolling over the scars of my past; blissfully oblivious of it’s existence. A mist of euphoria blows onto me and nothing else exists but that little red trickle- that little red trickle slowly rolling down my arm. That little red trickle is all I can see through my misty looking glass.