Chapter 201 : Blood and monsters

My reward was blood, the blade releasing it from its captivity inside my body. In my younger days I had decided that it was bad blood, it was the bit inside me that was hurting and I was letting it out and with it went the pain, or the fear or the anger. I couldn’t remember why I started. What at the age of 1o made me want to rip my skin on the edge of a sharp object, maybe it had originally been for the attention, maybe for a few seconds it had been about my farther kissing the cut with his warm lips and my mum sitting me on the table, legs swinging while she attached a Winnie the pooh plaster and roughed my hair telling me I was her brave soldier. It could have been that inside my head that made me what to cut myself, or maybe I just wanted someone to see the pain that I was in on the inside worn on my sleeve. Whatever the reason was, attention seeking or not my parents never actually found out about that first cut. There were no kisses or sticky plasters; instead I wore a jumper ashamed of what I had done. I had no agenda for cutting, no trigger as such. It was simple. I was a ten year old and I had a campus to hand.    

 Blood dripped from my wounds faster as I made more slashes into the skin each one ever so slightly wider than the first one. I was in steri-strip land now or skin glue maybe, it would have been fine without them but would leave a nasty scar. A few more cuts and maybe we were in the realms of external stitches. A lot more and maybe we could have been looking at internal and external  and then what was to stop me going the whole way and cutting the light blue lines that hid just under my wrist. I was a bomb, cut the wrong wire and I could explode.  

 Four more cuts. Making ten. I was most defiantly in the world of needle and thread. Yellow bubbles peeked out at me from the edges of my wound, the fat layer, one of the more experienced cutters goal. When scrapes with a campus no longer brought the kind of release that was needed. No longer sedated the craving that crawled around like an intruder under your veins, when he went deeper inside you spinning his webs you had to go deeper too just to find him and cause the evacuation. It worked for a while but He wouldn’t stop and soon he was inside your soul to deep to banish but not sedated enough to stop trying. We ripped veins, we tore flesh but never really found what we were looking for.

 On the eleventh cut the tears came surprising me somewhat they never normally made an appearance, they were a warning things were getting slightly out of hand, my control depleting. For ten marvelous cut I had controlled the blade but on the eleventh the blade took me and I slipped away from the situation. Ten cuts were enough for me, but not for the blade. Not for the monster. It was the monster that took my hands and made number twelve and number thirteen and by number fourteen I was sobbing somewhere underneath the monsters laughing, The relief had gone, there was no hazy lightness over my body I was going to have to fight myself and win somehow if I wanted to survive.