I Am Not Like You

I am not like you.

Unlike you, I am scarred. Everyone is scarred, I know, but I am scarred in a different way. I am marked and branded, and I did it myself. Willingly, gleefully. Sickeningly.

My arms are laced and crisscrossed with scars. Fat pink worms that nestle snugly under my skin. When I touch them, inadvertently, I see blood and my stomach roils. I smell the blood - I smell it, the coppery slickness of it, and I feel it unrolling down my arms. Hungry tongues lapping at my skin.

I cut myself. I use the present tense because it is still in me. I haven't cut myself in nearly ten years, but I am a cutter. It is how I define myself, it is who and what I am.

I am not like you.

This is me, thirteen years ago. I am in my room. I am crying. Everything aches, terribly. I pop the plastic off the top of a pink razor, pry the blade off, slowly, carefully. I suspect that I do not exist, not really. I want to make myself bleed, to prove that I am alive. So I stretch out my arm and I lay the razor across my wrist. The delicate throat of my wrist. There is a moment of hesitation, but it means nothing, I drag the razor across my wrist again and again until it bleeds and it burns and the throat of my wrist opens wider and wider until I am sated and empty, or something like sated, something like empty. I have never really returned from this place where I am bloody and raw and weeping and my throat is open.

I am not like you.

I wear long-sleeved shirts whenever possible. Sometimes I forget what I am and that's when I catch the glances thrown my way. The first look - the second - and the stare, the gaze, the fear, the disgust, the confusion, and I wonder what I should say. Sometimes it's silent confirmation - yes, you're seeing what you think you're seeing. Sometimes it's a just a tight smile - no, I won't explain myself to you. Sometimes it's a genuine explanation – okay, you really want to know? You want a guided tour of hell, I'll play Virgil to your Dante.

I am not like you.

I have constructed a new self carefully over the last ten years – now I look like you, I smile like you, I talk like you. I've become human, and when I walk into a room you would never know that I am not like you. But there are moments – moments when my hand brushes the raised skin of my arm – and that's when I smell the blood. I feel it rolling cold down my skin, and for a moment I am me again.