I’m writing. I’ve decided to spend my endless hours of utter uselessness on something productive rather than keep wasting them on mindless match-three games, which is what I’ve found myself doing lately. Losing a year of my life to illness wasn’t on my bingo card, but here I am, and something’s gotta give. That year isn’t over yet, so here goes.
Fiction is tricky. Concocting stories, characters, plot arcs; crafting something from the slivers of near-nothingness that experience has wrought in consciousness. Tim would call that alchemy. But I’m not an alchemist, aspirations be damned, so I’ll write what I know better than anything in this world or any other: me.
‘Me’, 37 years in, thick miasma of memories, mistakes, joys and heartaches, is a broad concept I’m not quite sure how to pin down, and searching this soul to try sets my teeth on edge. When I do, I’m gripped by a cold mist of dread and nauseating regret: wanting to be more, and worse, knowing that I could have been.
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This idea’s been burbling around in my head though, a mechanism for telling the stories that are myself. A way to contrive a sideways peek into the mess and mayhem that I am and make some sense of it; gut reconnaissance disguised as an innocuous surface inspection. A canvas of flesh painted over by memories to be sifted and searched.
Here it is: my body.
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On the inside of my wrist is a bitty scar, like a grain of white rice. Years ago in the old farmhouse on Sydney Road, I was prying with a kitchen utensil at the top burger in a frozen stack of twelve patties. My grip slipped, and the dull blade stabbed into my other arm just below its hand.
I felt stupid as fuck, staring at the line I’d split open in my skin. It didn’t bleed, but it stared right back at me, deep and purple at its center, as thin and wide as the tip of the tableware piece. I’d just slit open my wrist with a butter knife.
Back then, ideations of harming myself weren’t part of my life.