by Terri White
We meet at a nearby restaurant, laughing, hugging. I haven’t had a drink in four days. We order cocktail after cocktail, and by the time I leave to walk back downtown, I’ve drunk sixteen. And somehow, somewhere, between sixteen French martinis and a pitch-black stairwell, I fall down while walking upstairs. Plunging in the darkness, flying, until I hit a wall hard with my body at the bottom.
I crawl back upstairs on my hands and knees, and the next morning I wake with a screaming, sticky hangover and what later turns out to be a broken shoulder. I tell everyone how I fell in the darkness. How unsafe it was. How the hurricane has a lot to answer for. How it isn’t my fault.
Six weeks later, it’s Christmas in New York. The festivities, for me, have begun in earnest. One morning, a note on yellow paper is pushed under my door: ‘Can you let me know you’re OK? I’m really worried about you. Your neighbour, x’. Clutching it, cold fear takes hold of me. I search, scrape my brain, my empty memory, for the source of the concern. Last night was the work holiday party in an ornate, gilded-gold hotel bar with the colleagues I hate smiling for, smiling at every day. I ordered the strongest drinks they had, over and over, refusing the trays of tiny white food as my stomach spun and cramped and my chest tightened and I heaved.
There’s a door number on the note. I fight the instinct to shrink and hide, dreading the knock on the door more than what I choose to do: walk downstairs and knock.
Knock, knock.
‘Hi, I live upstairs. I got your note!’
‘Oh God, are you OK?’
‘I’m fine. Totally fine. Why would you ask?’
She starts to talk. She arrived home late last night, looked up the stairs as she jammed her key inside the lock and saw a pile: a gold dress, red shoes and a woman who looked like me inside them, lying unconscious. Gathering the woman in her arms, she’d asked:
‘This is where you live, right? Are you OK? Can I call someone?’
‘I live in Camden,’ the woman replied. ‘I need to get home to Camden. Where am I? Can you get me a cab?’
She’d dragged the woman inside, put her to bed. I laugh at her, at this woman, at that woman.
Just two weeks after this: a note on my front door, in different handwriting, stuck there for the day that I’d lain inside, not moving.
‘Clean up your fucking mess. Your neighbour.’
A trail of food I don’t recall being unable to hold in my hands, from the front door on the street to my door. I laugh at her, at this woman.
Four weeks more after this: another resident holds the door open for me, his face hardening as I say thank you without meeting his eyes. He recognises my voice.
‘You’re the one who comes in singing and shouting and crying in the middle of the night,’ he says with barely disguised anger.
‘Am I?’ I ask.
Am I? I laugh, at her, at this woman.
Three weeks later: I’m leaving for work and the glass in the front door is smashed, the splinters and shards spread out like a delicate spider’s web, trying to reach me. I stop; I flinch. I’m not sure I didn’t do it. Did I? A picture lurks inside me: my foot, the door, I’m crying, angry. But is it a memory? A dream? Something I just imagined? It’s pulled further into the sea that’s flooded my brain and now it’s beyond reach and I don’t know, I’ll never know.
I spend more and more time in the shadows, less time bothering to look for her. I know she’s lost, if not gone entirely. The thin, sharp sheets that belong to someone else scratch my skin as I tug them tighter around me. The shouting and clamour and heat and spit and stab of the city collect on my shoulders. The weight makes my spine, my head, bend like the boughs of the trees that cover me. The weight comforts me even as it kills me.
I sleep.
I drink.
I drink.
Hours one and two I still feel lighter. So free. So myself. Hours three, four and five: the load gets strapped on, heavier than before, heavier than yesterday, somehow. My back buckles and the load snakes around each shoulder and forces its way inside my throat as I choke. I feel, I fear, that I can’t survive this. I will die doing this. And it’s OK, because I deserve this. I belong in this. I belong here. I’m at home. I can feel the fur under my toes. I tuck them under me, lay my head and prepare to rest. Hours six and seven are when the relief, the darkness comes and I feel nothing.
CHAPTER 17
Squatting within the shadows in the darkest corners of the city, I start to cut myself again. I don’t remember the pebbly path of consideration, the thoughts and questions that would count as such. Or is it simply that my hands just picked up the blade – naturally, easily – without conscious, never mind careful thought? What day was it when thought became action and I carved myself up again? Though it will have been night. Deep night, the exact midpoint between the sun sinking and rising again. Of that I’m sure.
Did I ever stop? Really? If not physically still hunched over, belly over hips, as I opened up my own body until it was bloody, was I still there in my mind? Each period of time without its existence was a brief respite for my skin. A chance to refill. Little more than a chance for my blood to collect and pool inside me, ready to spill out when the silver sharp edge returned.
It might have been a while – how long? – but starting again is like breathing, sleeping. I know where to start, where to pick up where I left off – where I always do high and hidden. The tops of my arms, close to my shoulders while still being covered. The tops, the insides of my thighs. As things become worse, my aim becomes less precise, falls lower, sinks with speed and bursts out into plain sight. I slash at the inside of my arms, my wrists, my hands; then my neck and, for the first time, my face. The high pitch of pain runs through my bones until they rattle. I can’t keep it inside and, once the surface is broken, it spills around my edges.
I develop a toolkit of increasing variety, the biggest addition lent by the professional chef’s knives in the kitchen of my sublet. The rack of blades, pinned to wire on the wall, are of different shapes, sizes and sharpness. My eye trips over them as I step inside, causing a surge in my heart. I gaze at the knives, smitten, hypnotised by the light streaming across, bouncing off the blades. I’m in love, or, at least, lust.
I’d used knives before: knives that weren’t sharp, had been cheap many years before, could barely make it through the outer skin of a small brown onion. How could I expect them to break and butcher human skin, my skin? Hard pulls of the serrated blade across my arm produced little blood – as I released it, tiny specks, like ink falling from the end of a fountain pen appeared on my skin. Faster, harder pulls have little more success, as does sawing, like through French bread, dry and flaking out of the oven. Each knife is filed inside my mind, sitting neatly alongside the razors that have been there a while.
I began with disposable razors but by now I’ve discovered, somewhat gleefully, that a razor blade out of the plastic works better. A blatant truth in retrospect, but a discovery I only made after, in a fit of frustration at being unable to cut my own skin, I smashed the pink plastic razor in my hands between my palm and the hard porcelain sink. The exposed jagged plastic was pushed into my greedy skin, and in that moment I discovered how quick, deep and painless it was initially to cut with just the blade. The pain, of course, came seconds later, but the absence of agony in the moment just made it easier to cut and cut and cut, deeper each time.
Until that moment, grip closed around the chunks of plastic and snapped razors, I’d been ruled by the thought that I deserved it to be hard. An easy, quick, clean cut was a gift. A gift, a simple solution that I hadn’t earned yet, that I didn’t deserve. So, each time I pressed the mound of plastic and blade into my arm, my leg, my neck, struggling to judge the angle, the pressure and the strength needed to achieve the desired mutilation, I felt comfortable with the difficulty and indignity of the task at hand. Each place and push, scrape and cut, never revealed the damage until it was done, the pressure and weight released.
Somet
imes the skin would be scraped pink and raw. Sometimes it bore a cut – thin, precise, light. At other times I achieved a gash, deep and jagged, pulsing blood. Every time it hurt. Sometimes it really hurt. It, I, felt raw, sore, taut. The width, depth, shape of the wound was never consistent, always a surprise. My body was marked with holes, cuts, skin gouged out and chucked in the bin along with red-streaked tissues or towels when the job was bigger than a flannel.
As I hacked, stabbed and jabbed at my skin, I felt comforted by the discomfort, the difficulty, how hard it was to harm myself. The awkwardness and failed attempts folding inside me as my skin split open. The mixture of success and disappointment blending with the blood and skin.
But the intoxicating high it produced eventually paled next to the satisfaction I found with just a razor blade. The first time I tried it, clean, out of the head of a razor, I was hit by the heavy-eyed swoon of a straight, thin cut that opened me up like a grape bursting wide, spitting out its seeds. The rush of blood spilling out, pulsating and gushing and flowing silently, cascading and coursing down my arms and later across my wrists and round the tops of my thighs. The cooling trickle became a cold wave, the perfect salve for the burning on me, in me. I was red hot: every one of my organs baking and broiling. The rage and shame that imploded inside me, filling my body and rising up to touch the skin, turning me pink, hot to the touch, to the taste.
The morning after is always the worst. The night is a black blur – the flashes, flinching at the only glint of light bouncing off the silver blade under the orange light. The skin on my neck damp with tears, sticky with wine, the building, growing, morphing pain trying to push its way out of my chest when it fails to escape through my mouth, my eyes and ears.
At those moments, I see the bone in my chest explode open, a line carved straight down my middle, my skin 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 body against the brightly lit box which hums from the vibrations of the heartache, loss and pain in their voices.
I twirl the bottle of Vicodin that’s been rolling around the bottom of my handbag between my fingers. The white pills bounce, ricochet off their orange plastic home like a pinball machine. A fellow editor at work has gifted me with the full bottle, telling me that they made her vomit, were too strong. Not me. I have a strong constitution. The first time I swallow one, the stress, worry and thrum of anxiety dissolves and drips out of me. Happy isn’t the word; it’s woefully inadequate to describe the state of perfect bliss I descend into, sinking lower and lower into the floor. It is walking on clouds with hands floating wide; it is singing from an open window as the wind flows through; it is a heart-shuddering, soul-heightening joy that I can never truly describe. A room of wool and twine in which I sit, knowing that I can do anything, everything, all of it, whenever I want. No one can stop me. Ever.
Now I know what real, true happiness feels like, I have to ration it, obviously. I can’t truly begin to cope with what will happen when this happiness ends, is taken from me. This night, however, I know I’m owed it.
As the records end, load and spin underneath
my hip, I swallow two tablets, then reach in my bag for a final one, just to be sure, tossing it into the back of my mouth, where it hits my throat, stuttering on the way down. I follow it with two Xanax. Then, almost immediately: nothing.
The next day, I wake up. I can barely open my eyes and keep them open when I do. I’m lying across the bed in yesterday’s dress, ankle socks, shoes, beehive askew, hair grips lodged in the skin in my back, bag still over my shoulder. When I do manage to fully open my eyes I can barely see out of them – I fumble and find my phone: it’s 1.30 p.m. My screen is filled with missed calls. I’m meant to be going to Coney Island with a group of women I know. I text one. Tell her I overslept. Had a big night. She says they are worried about me. About what I was doing, what I’d done. I want to cancel with every bone and breath in my body but I can’t. The shame on top of whatever else I’m feeling would just be too much. We arrange to meet; we’re going to get the train together.
I haul my body off the quilt, my stomach already up in my mouth. I throw up once, twice; there’s no food in my mouth because there’d been none in my stomach (I can’t remember when I last ate). The vomit tastes of whisky, ginger, lime, wine, beer and acid. I get in the shower, counting the new small black bruises on me: my thigh, my arm, the bump on my head. I get out of the shower, vomit once more. I put on a new dress, new ankle socks and my brogues. Comb my matted hair, backcomb again. Spray, pat, spray, tease, smooth. I vomit again. Harder, longer. Blood hitting, splattering the bowl.
I make it to the subway station and onto the train. As it rocks and rolls towards Coney Island, I clutch my stomach, which is cramping and whirling under my fingers, under my skin. My mouth waters – squirts hitting both sides of my throat after being expelled from the glands. Sweat creates a trim the length of my hairline. At each and every stop I consider getting off, running through the doors, convinced I’m about to vomit violently, terrified I’m about to faint.