Third and First Person

I loved the way it felt.
I loved the way it looked.
I loved how pathetic it made me feel.
I loved the sensation when I dragged the blade across.
I loved the scar it left behind.
I loved the superficial relief it gave me.
I loved the blade that made me do it.
I loved watching the blood dry.
I loved hiding it.
I loved keeping it a secret.
But I hated the scab that tried to heal it.
Sometimes I’d kiss it,
and the feeling of the wound on my lips would comfort me.
I’d feel warm and engulfed in some kind of tender darkness.
What evil was this?
That sought out to comfort me when I did its will and broke my own flesh,
Perhaps a necessary evil,
one of which in exchange for my fresh scars they’d help me forget for a short while.
The anger and internal anguish instantly subdued by the release of my blood.
Vulnerability made me do it
and the Evil made me see beauty in it.
I swear I didn’t mean to do this to myself,  
I didn’t want to,
but I couldn’t handle the screaming in my head when I would try oppose it.
It was clawing me
from the inside you see?
Defacing me and taunting me internally,
what else was I supposed to do?
It grabbed my thoughts from my grasp and twisted them
until they became like thorns to my consciousness-
poking me and stabbing me if I opposed it.
Do you understand?
It wasn’t me,
it was the Evil.


At first she spoke slowly-
taking lengthy pauses between her short sentences.
Articulating each vowel and every other letter of every word she said,
almost as if she was feeling the shape and curves and edges of each letter of her words
with her tongue.
She spoke of her love for the scars she had created,
she spoke of the love she had once had for each and every aspect of it.
She spoke of the blood, the relief, the scab-
she spoke of it all.
How sometimes she’d kiss it,
run her fingers over it,
nurture it-
all in an attempt to reassure herself that the comfort it brought her wouldn’t scurry away.
She could feel the evil that dwelled within in its midst,
but actively she would ignore it.
She was more engrossed in how all the earthly condemnation of pain and anger
would cease to exist by the simple tearing of her skin.
All she had to do was listen to the voices-
the “Evil” as she called it-
and her pain relinquished.
Then the pace quickened,
suddenly she started muttering in fast,
difficult sentences.
Muttering words so fast she could barely decipher them herself-
sentences were fleeing with haste beyond her lips,
too fast for her to capture.
Verdicts of regret and defensiveness spewed from her mouth,
she began thrusting accusations and blames upon Vulnerability
and upon that of which she called the “Evil”.
Desperately
she dug through layers of their scepticism to try convince them of her victimization.
She would not receive the blame of her own actions,
she refused.