In the mind of a self-abusive teenager.

Rated T for somewhat graphic descriptions.

You've decided that you can't tell anyone what you've done, so you'll tell a page instead. To you, it's a brilliant plan, because paper won't judge your stupidity.

But you're nervous. Your throat constricts and tears sting your eyes. Maybe writing it isn't such a good idea. Ink is permanent. The words you write will be exposed to the world; the unfair, pain-filled world...

It doesn't matter. You can burn the pages later if you have to, but you absolutely cannot keep this inside forever. It'll destroy you.

Ha.

Words form on your tongue. Before you can stop them, they pulse through you to your fingers and burst through the pen, staining the page with your musings. You aren't entirely sure if your prose makes sense, but that's quite alright; you can rearrange it later.

Your scabs tingle, itch, and sting as you scribble, letting you know that they're as real as the pages in front of you, as the bed you're sitting on. Your free hand moves to your ankle to let your fingertips play over the wounds, the ten short lines tainted various shades of red. The pressure you apply is ever so light, but your lips twitch from the pain nevertheless.

You'd never meant to hurt yourself. You hadn't thought that the scars would last. You hadn't thought that they would hurt. You hadn't thought that the proof of your self-harm would still be there the next day...

How typical of you, never stopping to think about the after-effect of your actions. You wince. It's funny how your own words can hurt you sometimes.

Your mind replays last night.

Your ankle is propped against the other knee. A light shines onto your target, illuminating a few scratches from the previous night. Your right hand appears in the image, wielding a sharp piece of broken porcelain, a shard from a broken cup. It presses into your skin, and then veers to the side, leaving a pale, almost white line in its wake. The weapon returns to run through the scrape again, digging deeper this time, pressing harder, scratching away your confusion until the pointed tip turns a bright shade of red.

You barely feel a thing.

You've dug a ravine in your skin. You watch as it floods with scarlet that spills over the sides and leaks down to your toes. You glance at your white sheets, realizing that you'll have to clean the cut. Later, you think as you start to dig again.

You snap back to the present, to the pages in front of you. Your actions had made perfect sense while you'd carried them out. But now, as their result is exposed to the light of day, they seem foolish and irresponsible.

You try to remember why you had thought self-destruction to be your answer. You draw a blank. You hadn't been thinking while you'd done it. You hadn't had any particular motive. You hadn't had a specific person or thing in mind. You had simply done something on impulse... again.

Impulse by Ellen Hopkins; you'd enjoyed that book... or was it a very long free verse poem? No matter. Vanessa was in the institution because she was a cutter. She had an addiction to physical pain, a need to feel something other than her emotional turmoil. You'd thought it was a stupid reason while you were reading it, but now it made sense to you.

Still, it couldn't be the reason for your own actions; you had no unbearable emotional burden. And it isn't the pain that you seek; it's the... well, what is it that you get out of this?

Let's go back to figuring out a possible motive.

What were you thinking before you'd reached for your weapon?

You close your eyes and try to remember.

I need a hug.

The words had repeated themselves constantly in your mind, over and over again until they'd rolled quietly over your tongue, forcing you to taste the bitterness of longing in every syllable. It was such a simple sentence. But simple sentences are the ones that tend to change to world. In this case, it was your world.

Next question: why had you felt that you'd needed a hug so badly?

You imagine wrapping your arms around someone, leaning into them, letting them carry your weight for a moment. Maybe that was it; maybe it was about letting someone else support you.

It would explain the desire to hug someone, but not the cutting. Pain doesn't support you; it weakens you.

You sigh. This is going nowhere. It's a dead end. Everything is a dead end. That's the way life works, isn't it? Life is a dead end. We spend our time driving down this road, but what's at the finish line? Death. It sounds like a waste of energy. Why not just take a shortcut? You're getting to the same place, but quicker. If everyone is always in such a hurry to get somewhere, doing things carelessly and half-heartedly to get them over with faster... then why aren't they rushing to get to the end of the road? Everywhere you go, people are scurrying and shuffling, pushing and shoving, tripping over little things to get somewhere. Does it even matter whether they get there or not? What's the point in trying to change the world? The next generations are just going to die, too.

Annoyed, you swat away your thoughts. You'll never take that shortcut. You've toyed with the idea before, but you've decided to enjoy the scenery instead of exhausting yourself by racing to the end. If you feel like it, you can justify committing suicide later; at the moment, you're trying to come up with a good reason for having inflicted-

You don't want to finish that thought.

You want... What do you want? You want to know what you want. But wouldn't that technically be what you want? Oh, whatever.

You drag the idea of the hug back into your mind, needing to look at it from another angle.

Again, you imagine hugging someone.

Why does 'the hug' have to be your answer? You hug your parents... Not as often as you used to, though. You've been drifting away from them lately. You don't want to talk to them, you don't want to explain anything to them; you just don't want to be around them. You feel guilty for thinking this, but there's nothing you can really do about it. It wasn't a decision you had consciously made; it was just something that had gradually overwhelmed you, taking over your actions in their presence.

Perhaps it was just your lack of being hugged that had brought on your desire-your need-for one. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. The artist certainly wasn't the first person to say this, but it was the phrasing from those lyrics that had stuck in your mind. Big Yellow Taxi; that was the name of the song. The title had very little to do with the lyrics. Or maybe the entire thing was about a big yellow taxi, but no one had bothered to notice... You can figure that one out later, too.

You lean sideways and hang an arm off the mattress, reaching your hand under the bed skirt to pull a dictionary out from under it. With a weak effort, you toss it up and onto the pages you'd managed to scribble a few thoughts onto.

Why do you have a dictionary under your bed? You can't remember.

A, B, C, E, F, I; you've gone too far. You flip backward though the pages. HYPOTHETIC, HYDROSCOPE, HUSKILY, HUMBLE, HUE... You run your index down the first column.

Hug: to clasp tightly in the arms, esp. with affection; embrace. To cling firmly or fondly to; cherish: to hug an opinion. To keep close to, as in sailing, walking, or in moving along or alongside of: to hug the shore; to hug the road. To cling together; lie close. A tight clasp with the arms; embrace.

That doesn't help. You slam the dictionary shut and toss it to the foot of the bed. You glare at it, but of course, that doesn't help either.

Well, how would you define the word? You mumble something, annoyed with the little voice in your head. But it does have a point. You think about it.

The first entry should define the verb: to hug. The act of embracing, of clinging to; physical contact.

Your mind starts spinning, thinking in thin, vague wisps of thoughts that you couldn't possibly catch. They make you dizzy.

After a few moments, you've recovered from your vertigo, and you're left with your explanation: you need physical contact, whether it's from a person or a sharp piece of a shattered coffee mug. That sounds incredibly desperate. You're pathetic. But what can you do? It makes sense.

One last question: why do you need something physical? Your answer comes to your lips immediately, and you whisper it to the lonely-looking dictionary.

"When it's physical, you don't have to think."

Recently, you've been thinking in emotions instead of in words. You're tired of feeling. You're tired of thinking. You're tired of trying to figure things out. You just want to leave everything tangled in a heap and walk away from it for a moment.

You hadn't been thinking when you'd ripped up your ankle, and that was exactly the answer: you liked not having to think. You liked that everything had just stopped.

You look at the papers, where your fingers had already written nearly a thousand words without you noticing. You pause for a moment, in shock, and then allow yourself to continue writing, to continue spilling your thoughts as you spill the ink, to let yourself let go. And you'd never dreamed that it would make you feel so incredibly free.

Subject matter aside. How was the writing? No one close to me can give me a valid opinion since they assume that it's personal... Oh well.
Review for a review. :)
Gracias.