October 10, 2019
Okay, I lied. Just a little bit.
Yes. You didn’t dissociate through the entire thing. There was no small part of that scene that was horribly, terrfyingly intentional.
What really woke me up was watching this person-who-was-me somehow go into ‘fuck it’ mode and tear the shit out of his right arm from one end to the other with a very sharp, very new razor blade.
It was like the rush of coming to your senses after a nightmare, the pulling forward and the re-anchoring, the flood of adrenaline in preparation for flight.
It wasn’t necessarily the cut that woke me. It was the second or so before when I entered that ‘fuck it’ mode, and I was too slow, too confused and frightened to stop this person-who-was-me from pulling the ultimate embarrassing act: trying to commit suicide while watching a dumb ’90s science fiction show.
It was a slow awakening. You weren’t just too slow, you were not fully awake yet. The dream of dissociation was still clinging, gauzy, to you.
I can remember it so clearly.
You can remember it because you still live it.
Yes. I still feel that slide into someone-else-ness, and then the snap back when drawn back into self-ness. Back into here and now.
You felt that last night.
Yes.
You felt that slide into dissociation, felt the folding blade click into place with a vague sense of surprise, then jolted as it drew across your leg.
Yes.
You felt that same jolt of humiliation and pain and anger and fear.
Yes.
Especially this time. You cut too deep. Your usual superficial-yet-still-painful scratch had turned into something of a flay.
Yes.
You needed twelve stitches. You lied and said you dropped your knife while cleaning it.
Yes.
Are you writing about this now because you were, on some subconscious level, working up to this most recent little climax?
I really don’t know.
Tell me what happened after.
I started whispering James’ name–
Both times?
Both times. I started whispering his name, then eventually swallowed the miniscule bit of pride I had left and called out loud enough to wake him up. “Can you come help me?” I asked. It took asking two more times before he got up. I found out later that he thought I had made a mess and just wanted help cleaning up, thinking that I should just clean up my own messes. A good point, that.
Though the rest of the night in March is still sort of a blur — I hadn’t totally gotten out of the state that I was in, just woken up enough to engage with the mechanics — I do remember James helping me to clean and bandage my arm as we sat on the floor of the bathroom, the dog occasionally wandering in and out. The whole time, I was still sobbing, blubbering out, “I don’t want to leave you, I don’t want to leave Zephyr, I don’t know why I did that, I’m sorry” over and over again.