Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

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.

Sometimes 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