As I sat in the darkened room alone, slowly dragging on my cigarette and I wondered why I was not scared. And as I looked around, at all the remainders of relationships scattered around me, movie stubs, books, dried flowers, jewelry I smiled. It started as a giggle and then progressed to a steady laugh. A half an hour later I was rolling on the floor manically laughing at their pathetic efforts. I had finally realized it. They couldn’t hurt me. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how bad they tried to make it for me they could never, ever, ever, hurt me. Why? How?
Emotional pain? I had no emotions. There comes a point I think after you have sensed every emotion on both ends of the spectrum to the max, when you loose your ability to feel. When you have been so happy that you can’t stop smiling and you look forward to every second like it was the best second of your life, like if you were a little kid who got to buy any toys he wanted at a toy store, you can never be that happy again. When you have been so sad that tears no longer came to your eyes, you were dry and free of them and even if you wanted to cry with all your might simply to soothe your eyes no drops would come. When you have been so content that you wanted no improvement, when you no longer desired anything but for everything to stay the same forever until it did change. When you have been enraged to a point of murder, and I mean really horrible murder, where you felt you could rip a person apart with you bare hands and tear through their flesh with your teeth you loose the ability to get mad. I had lost my ability to feel any emotion in the book and they had no idea.
Physical pain was no longer existent for me. I had been hit too many times to feel pain. I still remember every bruise my mother ever gave me, every object she ever threw at me. I don’t think I could remember my old address but I could describe precisely what happened every time my mother lost it. Slowly, I built up immunities to it but then it became more than that, I began to feel like it was my life, I deserved it, I needed it to thrive. Pain was now a new kind of pleasure for me. I had dragged a razor-sharp blade across the skin of my own wrists too many times and had too many white scars lining my arms up and down to care about pain. I had held lit lighters in my hand until they got so hot they would sizzle when I touched them to my skin, and I would do it over and over until the blister on my arm got so burned that it didn’t hurt anymore. I had lit cigarettes and smoked them simply for the purpose of watching myself jab them into my arm while they were still burning. Physical pain was dead.
Love? Sex? Rape? I had loved so dearly that I would have given my life for him and I had lost, I could never fall that deeply in love again and thereby I could never be hurt by love as badly as I had been. Rape? I had been raped. I had been raped many times by someone who was supposed to be my first love, the first boy I had ever been with, he was supposed to teach me to care, and to love, instead he taught me that want and care for nothing but sex and they will not stop at any length to get it. He taught me that sex was the only way to have a relationship, he taught me to hold back my tears even if it hurt, even if I didn’t want to. Eventually, I became so detached from my body that being raped to me would belike watching a movie about someone getting raped. It was no longer me being violated; it was simply a body being used up. Death? I had no fear of death. Not because I was so righteous that I had accepted death, and not because I believed in life after it. First of all, it was because I wanted to die. Each and every one of them knew it. They didn’t know even but they felt it. It was obvious in the way I never looked before crossing a street, in the way I drove twice the speed limit on windy roads, in the way I could run until I couldn’t breathe at all. It wasn’t because I was careless or dangerous. It was because I no longer cared for my life. They felt that I dreamt of putting a gun up to my head and pulling a trigger, that every time I held a knife I wondered if it was sharp enough to slit my wrists, that every time I took a pill I considered taking the entire bottle. Yes, they all knew it. But that wasn’t even the entire reason; there is a more.
The second, and most amusing part was this.
With no emotions, no pain, no fears, wasn’t I already dead?
