A Scene Of Self-Image

Serious trigger warnings -- self-hate, self-mutilation, and (horror!) purple prose.  I'm going to make the text match the background.  Click and highlight to read.

A Scene of Self-Image

The space is a gray nothing, a cool stone floor and a place with no walls and a sky draped with lead-gray clouds.  I can see myself in a mirror, the defined reflection that looks back at me every day, plus the ghostly reflection of my back side.

There's a voices.  It has no person or gender or identity, it's just a voices -- many equalling one.  //Undress.//

I do.  Shirt and pants and shoes.  I like wearing hats, so of course I'm not wearing one here.  This is reality and reality is not about liking.

Off with my underthings, plain cotton, with a pad in the croch and a falsie where my left breast never grew.  The clothes disappear.  Here they have no use.

//What do you see?//

From head to toe, I quantify myself.  Dishwater blonde hair on a scalp that flakes.  A face boiling with fresh acne, brown spots showing where I've tried to dig it out and my ungrateful skin rebelled.  A short neck with a dark ring around the base no scrubbing will take off.  A hunched back, rounded shoulders.  One breast drooping, the other missing.  A double-keg of stomach.  It's a massive thing, this, and I describe it at some length.  It's the first and last thing anyone ever sees, it's the reason everyone knows me even if they don't.  An ass that starts above the small of my back.  Under the droop of my belly there's a shadow that might be a mons.  Legs falling down all over themselves in massive pouches.  Feet swollen and shiny with the fluid my heart's not strong enough to cycle on its own.

I hate it.  Every micrometer, every cell, every fiber.

//Then change it.//

There's a knife in my hand.  I don't know how, I tell the voices.

//We'll tell you,// the voices say, and shard into a noise of contradicting advice and instruction and encouragement.  Stab here, slice there, let this drain, pump that up.

It'll hurt.  I don't like hurting.

//There's no pain here.//

Oh.  So I go to work.  They're right, no pain.  If anything, it's all intellctually interesting, the way my body reacts to the knife.  The gray light makes everything stand out in especial detail.  Blood and fat and flesh.  It's slippery and disobedient to my will, like it's fighting me.  Why is it fighting me?  It must know this is all to make things okay.

And even if it doesn't work, at least I'll have scars to show that I tried.
-BJ