Her veins collapsed into themselves every time she tried to push her needle in. Useless. All used up. Off came the heavy leather belt she used for this particular ritual, falling from around her arm, leaving a white ring where the leather had been a moment ago. She couldn't bear the pressure on her skull, pressing in on her temples, in her lips, on her skin. Felt the primal urge to prick herself somewhere, anywhere, just get the needle in and feed. Life could be so simple at this level.
The sun was beginning to rise outside her curtainless window, casting faint light on the mountains of filth surrounding her. The hypodermic was slippery in her sick shaky hands. Just hit the line. She bent over a cracked mirror that lay on the coffeetable, coated with coke residue but not yet opaque. She gazed upon her haggard complexion, reflecting upon the gray film ground into the lines and creases, shards of skin that fell onto the glass. Just another stranger, she thought to herself. She pulled an eyelid down with her free hand and eased the head of the needle into her orb, through the white membrane just under the cornea. She held it there for a moment, savoring the delayed kick that always came with good shit such as what little she had left. The shot burned in her socket, but she really didn't feel it. Not anymore. As she withdrew the hypodermic, she saw in the mirror a tiny bead of blood form on her eyeball, suspended. It smeared away as she blinked.
"I'm a desperate woman," she moaned out loud, falling backwards into the rotted couch. She felt hot and tired and blissed out and horny and worn away, as from years of friction upon her stability, all chemical reactions to the smack flooding her system disguised as authentic human emotions. Same emotions leaving in an instant, as quickly as they came, allowing her to wallow in nullification.
She dreamt of a life that collapses in upon itself, entombed within self-contained pity, rubble, and waste. She dreamt of the stranger who, in more naive times, promised to rescue her from prostitution and squalor, only to introduce her to a life of starring in a string of vicious amateur S&M videos, paying her in heroin addiction and abuse. Times such as these, she prayed in the back of her mind that he would come back again, this time different, changed for the better, cleaned up, the proverbial knight in shining armor. Maybe this time he wouldn't burn her with cigarettes and punch her in the mouth any time she disagreed with his final say on all things. Maybe this time he wouldn't make her abort a five-month-old fetus in a gas station bathroom after a Drano cocktail and several kicks to the stomach, on the way to another porn shoot.
(It's probably not even mine you fucking whore) Maybe this time he'll care.
She hates herself. To be perfectly honest, she hates everyone, everything around her, these walls, strangers' faces. But she hates herself the most.
But she gets by on the sheer monotony of it all; the empty days filled with trying to score, then eventually getting high. She did what she had to do to get the dope, she didn't like to think about it, but she did it. Nothing else really mattered, and why should it? As long as she could get fucked-up for a good portion of the day and forget about who she was, the 24 hour span could be an exact replica of the one before, and the one before that, and she wouldn't give a shit.
Sliding off the couch cushions, she leaned her head against the edge of the table. The sunlight began flooding the cluttered one-room apartment, chasing the roaches back into their hidden homes, over indeterminate piles of garbage and remnants of a life vacantly lived. This is what I'll be remembered by. This hovel will be my final will and testament. This, and my rotting carcass.
There was a razorblade on the floor beside her, left over from a few grams of coke she'd scored last week. It had cost her a gathering of consensual bruises on her ass and her thighs. Small price to pay, right? Up her nose in a matter of seconds and slick grease oozed out her pores. Faint memories. She picked up the thin slice of metal and reminisced about how, as a self-absorbed teenager, she felt so numb, so cut off from the rest of the world. There was something wrong with her, she felt deep inside. She wasn't like everyone else, who had people who cared for them and people to care for. She had no one, and even if she did, she wouldn't know how to go through the motions to discover some deep-seated feelings, like love or happiness or any of that other bullshit that she told herself that she didn't need. Fuck all that. But she knew she wasn't fooling herself. There had to be some kind of response to issue forth from her soul, if she had one. That was where that familiar razor came into her life. She'd carve up the insides of her forearms and wrists, so strong was the urge to feel something. Even pain and bleeding was preferred to the nullifying void in which she existed in misery. The blade would dance across her skin, occasionally making her scream out, but rarely. She needed to rip at the flesh that imprisoned her in this hell. Railroad track scars cris-crossed her body, puckering the pink skin with deep purple passes, looking more and more like a suicide failure several times removed. But it wasn't a self-destructive urge that drove her, as few people around her could never understand, even if she felt the urge to try and explain to uncaring assholes. If anything, it was for sanity and her own survival that made her cut herself. She wanted to feel like everybody else. It was this misunderstanding that sent her to way too many shrinks and half-way houses, only to endure various other forms of abuse and torment that she didn't already get at home (She still had the occasional nightmare about splintered broomhandles and rat traps, when she didn't properly medicate herself). Her purging ritual also sent her to the emergency room one night, after the ennui drove her to cut too deep. She felt death the closest that night; a vacant friend standing in her doorway, reaching out for her hand. Its presence didn't frighten her, and she stumbled across the floor to grasp its hand, but her freaked-out mom got to her first and called the paramedics. Forty-seven stitches in the once arm, thirteen in the other, and a brand new counselor who she was supposed to open up to and talk about her feelings of inadequacy. That was when things began really shutting down. Propped up on pillows in that room, floating away on the morphine they were pumping into her I-V, she realized that numbness was a great improvement over this bullshit. Emotions were for those who hadn't been completely fucked-over, yet.
She tried to focus on such past happenings, old times, but it always seemed like she was peering into someone else's life, a psychic eaves-dropper. She usually came to the conclusion that her memories were something she'd read, or had seen in a vapid sitcom on tv, canned laughter lingering in the corners of her mind. Made things easier in a lot of ways.
Could I do that again, she thought. She imagined herself tracing the old scars still faintly visible from the fresher track marks, lightly drawing the razor along the paths that she'd laid out, like a fleshy roadmap. Re-opening the wounds that once had let her feel almost alive, if only for brief reprieves.
Could it make me feel any better?
Could anything make my life worse?
Looking out the uncovered window she saw the sun out in full shine, illuminating so many others' pointless existences, all of them toiling away for nothing. They all struggled to the top of their own shit-heaps, only to have more dung dumped on their heads. If they only knew what I know, how ridiculous it all is, as she paused for effect deep inside her head, they'd all be a lot more like me.
She gripped the blade between her index finger and thumb of her left hand, like a baseball player choking up on his bat, and dragged the sharpness slowly, a shallow valley up her right arm, tracing the vein, and then pulled it deeper into the bend of her elbow. The pain was a white hot flash that reverberated through her skull. The severed nerves screamed their signals up her spine, a great wince contorting reaction spilling across her face. Opening her eyes, however, she was quite surprised to see no blood spilling from the long would, only just the pock-marked skin split by the new divide, obviously injured, but dry of any blood. Even the flesh looked drained of the liquid. She began to feel panicked, much more than had she'd seen all her blood exit the gash.
What's wrong with me? She turned her arm over, examining it, trying to shake even a few precious drops free. Anything. All that came out was a fine black dust which flowed from the cut in a virtual waterfall of dark granules. She looked down at the powder, laughed to herself as she traced lines in it with her fingertips. The injured arm lay limply in her lap. This is all I am. No wonder I never felt like a human being. Apparently I never was one of them.
The razorblade waited patiently as it rested on her thigh. She could feel the energy contained within its small compact shape, the kinetic juice that needed to find an outlet, that needed to be drained. For a moment, she admired it and its graceful potential. You are what you are. You do what you're supposed to do and you perform efficiently. So much more than I could ever be. She examined her cut again, this time closer, searching for signs of her mind hallucinating it all. Everything certainly seemed real. It hurt her to poke at the smooth lips of it, and she could see tendons and various other parts that flexed and rotated as she twitched her fingers. Just no blood, none of that red fluid that everybody had pumping inside them, more of the black soot coating the parts inside. A certain cold numbness began creeping into the digits, making it hard to move them as the time progressed, though. A preconceived future slowly became more and more unsure. Time to continue this performance. No sense wasting any more time.
She opened her mouth and pressed the razor flat upon her tongue, leaving it to rest there. What if I just swallow? I can move on, or even rest, if that's even a possibility. Maybe there is a peace out there that I can embrace, that will draw me in and protect me from myself? Christ knows I haven't felt anything like that yet in this lifetime. I'm surrounded by the potential for failure here, the chance of losing what little I have left. Just the hope that something like that's out there for me is infinitely better than the odds I got here. All I got left is worthlessness, and what's gonna happen when somebody takes that away from me?
Like a Host on a Sunday Mass, she closed her mouth and swallowed the razor.
It guided itself down her throat, riding through muscles that squeezed it along, gouging deep rips down her insides as it traveled. She began to choke and cry, clutching at the pain inside her. Overwhelming heat and a great dragging sensation throbbed within her being. She wasn't ready for this, the way every second seemed perpetually frozen as the agony multiplied inside her body. The razor refused to stop as her digestive track tried to break it down as food. Thrashing about on the floor, she saw herself, far away, floating on the thickest dope high she could ever had imagined. That sick, old thing, used-up, nothing to offer anyone but her own misery, she saw it struggling with a fate from which it couldn't flee. The blood finally came, out from the mouth in black syrupy strands, ropy and hot, free from the container. She watched herself quit spasming after a while. The struggle was over. The punishment, the anguish, the self-mutilation was all completely forgiven and forgotten. She was free to go.
