Chapter 1 : broken glass

I wondered around the room, half-dazed with my music up high. It was clear even to my self at this point that I had lost control. I threw another handful of Paracetamol into my mouth with some pop and swallowed with a grimace. Paracetamol was not my pill of choice to kill my self with, but I had little chance of sneaking my anti-depressants away from Annie and Paul with out them knowing. The doctor had told them to guard those little pink pills with their life and never ever let me have more then one at a time. They did this job well. Paracetamol on the other hand was readably available from any shop. It had not been hard to get a load.

I had been repeatedly told that I had been a pain to place. When I say place, I mean with foster parents. It was plastered all over my folder that I had high ‘special needs’ and ‘complex issues’. This was a polite way of saying ‘she gets over excited with razor blades and likes to try and off her self when given the opportunity’. Even though I was classed as an emergency it took my social worker ages to find someone who would take me on. In desperation they called Annie and Paul. Hardly a top choice for someone with as many difficulties as me but they had to do. My mother refused to keep me another day and even though they had a 12-month-old daughter of there own, Annie and Paul offered and Maggie (my social worker) hollered sold!

Under the cover of the ear splitting music, I casually knocked a glass of water off my bedside table and watched the glass shatter on the hard floor instantly; the sharp edges shone up at me like little angels from heaven. Glass normally wouldn’t have been my first weapon of choice either: I much preferred razor blades, carefully extracted from the grips of the safety razor. Or a shiny new blade retrieved with a tiny screwdriver from the inside of a pencil sharpener. However, with the arrival of me, a locking cabinet was bought and all razors and pencil sharpeners where locked away. If there was one thing that Annie and Paul did well, it was caring- they were smart too, but I had been playing this game longer then they had: I would always win. I did not want to hurt them, but I wanted to die, suicide is never painless regardless of what people say. There are always casualties.

I did not know very well about the in’s and outs of cutting with glass. I did not know how to hold it or how hard I should press or anything like that. That was the thing with your chosen weapon, when you self harmed after a while you became used to it. Knew how to handle it knew exactly the right amount of pressure to apply to get exactly the kind of cut you wanted. It was almost like a sick kind of Art. The art of mutating your own skin to a standard that was right for you.

Doing my best with a foreign tool, I turned my arm over and studied it, finding a good spot I slashed the piece of glass down upon my wrist.