Crash and Burn

Summer is here. I can feel it straight into the marrow of my bones: the heat, the fatigue, all coating my lungs thick, making me irritable. The dry torridity makes the atmosphere heavy and suffocating, the air like fire, the wind like flames. It's the sort of heat that calls for water, water to drink, water to swim. It's the sort of heat that calls for intensity.

The family's going out to the beach, and we're going to have a blast. Women and children in the waves, seaweed and jellyfish against the lycra of their swimsuits. The men and I stride down the peer in our tattered shirts, a beer in one hand and a rod in the other, our hooks swinging precariously close together. Yes, the family's off to Corpus Christy, and we're laugh to the crisp scent of the ocean, watching the sun sink below the horizon. Our vacation will be the thing of fond memories.

Only, I don't want to go. The sun is unbearable and the sand sticks between my toes. Salt in my hair and sweat down my back. I hate the summertime.

I'd rather stay home in the cold processed air, wrapped in a blanket all alone. Drinking tequila 'till midnight like it's the sweetest thing that's met my tongue, I'll listen to hardcore rock, the type of music that calls for either fucking or fighting, or both at the same time. Or I'll cradle the phone to my ear and cry to the dial tone, wishing I could swallow my pride like I swallowed those pills, and call for help. Anything is better than the beach and those skimpy bikini outfits meant to reveal and exaggerate. Anything's better than that not-quite nudity.

For perfect tans and perfect abs don't matter when my honey-brown arms and legs are covered in track marks. Tiny moments in history engraved in the softness of my flesh, these scars are not beautiful and clean, but disgusting, horrible, morbid. Raised, twisted pink; thin white lines like spider webs; prison bars of angry red; my disfigurements, my flaws, all entwined like ribbons, like the limbs of sweaty lovers. I am unclean, impure, and I have the scars to prove it.

Why do I do it? Why do I, someone who has everything to live for, a girl whose success is written in the stars, resort to self-mutilation? Why do I press the razor's edge against my skin and drag it across? Why do I bleed out the pain the way sickness was bled out in the Dark Ages, tapping the vein with clean slick metal?

Because it's an addiction, beautiful and alluring and grotesque, kind of like using heroin for the very first time. Only, this is a fresh, stark sort of high- no confusion, no haze, no stumbling down steps to kiss the concrete with chapped lips. It's like releasing pressure, all that hollow aching-throbbing in my heart, that breathless knot tied tight in my chest, that chilling static filling my mind to the brim... all that quiet chaos, all that self-loathing, leaking out with each drop of opaque blood. Slicing is like paradise for those first few seconds, the razorblade like an angel of bliss until I realize the horrid truth of the situation: that I've cut my body to bloody ribbons, just to feel a moment of this not-quite joy.

And then the world comes crashing down once more, and I'm left sickened by my obvious weakness. Self-pity rolls through my stomach, my rage and despondency crashing against that calm feeling of relief. I begin to tremble, the tremors starting at the core of my soul, and quaking outwards.

I can't take it anymore! I'm losing my fucking mind! Can someone help me, please? Fuck my pride. Fuck my stubbornness, my inability to ask for aid! Fuck my fucking anger!

Can't anybody help me?

I raise the scarlet-smeared blade and poise it above a clean spot on my thigh.

The roller coaster starts all over again.

Time to slash, crash, and burn.