I used to save my blood. Not in a bottle or anything, and it wasn’t like I was trying to salvage every drop or even most of it – it wasn’t really a saving blood kind of thing. And I never went for the menstrual blood or anything. Nothing really gross like that. Actually, let’s even start over, because this sounds ‘gross like that’ but it wasn’t really about the blood.

I’ve kept a diary since I was very young, starting in these fancy, frilly little notebooks and ending in whatever cheap shit I could get, whatever was on sale, whatever paper I could afford to consume, punctuated by some too-nice leather bound somethings around my birthday month each year, because once people figure out something simple as a notebook is an acceptable present to give you, they never bother with anything else. 

The early drafts seem normal – Dear Diary, and then a concise and readable narrative that could be understood from the outside. It started as something Ms Kim, my counselor, suggested. I always worked hard on my counselor-suggested projects, too. Much harder than I worked on any schoolwork or something, something that mattered. I liked the therapy stuff way better. Other shit I could be working on was outside, involved looking outside, but I didn’t want that. What I wanted was mirrors, thousands of mirrors, all around me, and a magnifying glass to focus down on me, me, me. That’s what therapy was. That’s what I used it for, anyway. 

A few months in I mentioned to my counselor that I was glad this had been suggested to me. “And like – adolescent depression is something that not that many people experience, it’s a totally rare and fascinating thing that’s happened to just me, and someday, when all the preps I go to school with grow up they’ll cherish the published account of all my whiny emo bullshit. I’m going to publish it! And everyone’s really gonna think, you know, about how tough I had it and how much better they could’ve been to me.” I said, or, you know, I said something like that, anyway.

Ms Kim was immediately disapproving, “No, you’re doing it wrong,” she said without hesitance, “You can’t be writing it like it’s ever going to be read by anybody. So just decide it’s not. And who cares if someday it is – that’s what editing is for. You’ll be different enough by then that you’ll do editing you wouldn’t even think of now, anyway, so just put everything down like no one’s ever going to read it but you.”

So I tried. At first it was only that I’d stop myself in the midst of my pandering explanations meant for people living outside my head and say, ‘but I don’t have to,’ and stop, gleeful like I’d figured out a cheat in a videogame all on my own.

Then, that’s when the blood thing started. I didn’t cut myself for it, but I used to skateboard to school and back, and I wasn’t really good at skateboarding, so scabs were common. Sometimes there were fresh little bursts of scraped skin. Instead of writing about it, I would hold the book to them and press. Pull it away and there was a red mark that quickly faded to brown, telling my diary and my future self what had happened far more concisely than I ever could have with words. Sometimes I picked at the scab if I was in the mood to have that again, that little mark, lying to myself to some extent about how eventful my life was, how painful. Lying the way I used to, when I was thinking of my diaries as epic melodramas about the tragic life of me, poor, tragic me. But it was just an old reflex more than anything else. It didn’t even work, because like Ms Kim advised – I could only think about myself reading these, and myself-of-the-future would be able to tell those blood blots were fake, even if she couldn’t remember faking them. These marks were smaller, and more concentrated. 

Eventually, I started outlining each splatter with sharpie – made little amebas, little bubbles, little organic shapes from organic matter. 

Eventually, I started cutting. 

That made the most lovely ladders. That didn’t need any sharpie, any outline or design. I used the red to underline my most important words and thoughts. 

Contrary to popular bullshit, the cutting wasn’t ever part of my central spotlight tragedy act. It happened in secret places – my thighs, my hips, the flabby dark sides of my tummy. These were better places than the wrists, anyway, because they were a wider expanse – a flatter canvas. And the scars left behind were pale, once healed over, and more delicately traceable than the gaudy stretch marks that normally potched up my skin. By that point I didn’t view my life as especially tragic, and I suppose it wasn’t (or at least I didn’t know it wasn’t), even if it was, oh so finally, more original than my angsting adolescent desperation to be special. Mental illness is common, but not considered normal. My twelve year old self would’ve been thrilled by the sickly, empty mess of my fifteen year old self. Finally, something special. Finally, a real, solid tragedy. 

The old brown marks in my early journals were jumbled, smeared and fuzzy, dark but at one point lit up, I know, like spilled battery acid, my very life force, my big ol’ fucking hot topic tragedy, look! At! Me!

Then there are the lines. Clean, dark, simple. I remember how the paper used to peel away from me, after I’d let it sit on my bleeding self, the pain a musical hum in the back of my mind, endorphins soft as my mother’s hand pushing back my hair. I was static in a world gone dark, and the words I wrote between those lines were small, quiet, written by those plastic lead-filled pencils, the kind that break and waste themselves if you push down too hard, so everything you write just whispers.

Stuff sort of stopped, then, sort of stopped tasting like anything at all. Both figurative, with the stuff I only metaphorically consumed, and literally, with honest to god food – I don’t remember the exact point, but there was one, there was a time After when everything was dry sawdust in my mouth, when every drink was watery, nothing was sweet enough or bitter enough or salty enough, nothing could meet what I wanted from a swallow. I know now, what that was about. But I didn’t know, then. Then I just knew that one of life’s most simple joys was nothing, now, and that the sun didn’t feel quite right, that the shadows felt too cold and the lights in the ceiling of my school made a low whining sound, that dust and metal was everywhere, that each breath of air tasted like a gargling gulp of blood, there was so much iron to consume, to force down into my own straining pink lungs, to poison myself with. That was when we still lived in the city, and the stink of it still haunts me, the way the air burned and the trees turned gray instead of red and gold in fall and all of life was one chain linked concrete choked gasp of insufficient oxygen, with a hazy, polluted sun hanging over it all.

That was another warning sign, see, but we didn’t see, no one wanted to see that kind of shit, then. The fervor hadn’t caught on, and I don’t think we would’ve got it even if it had. 

My parents loved me, you see. They loved me very much.

We moved after I accidentally nicked a vein in my thigh and almost bled to death. I’d like to say that I sat back, that I accepted it as the next step, that I’d lost as much hope as I claimed to and it was only by coincidence that I was saved. But regardless of what I am, I am like you, I am an animal, and like any animal, I fought to live. 

First – blood, too much, suddenly spurting, suddenly sliding, suddenly wasting itself on my legs, trickling down to fat brown ankles, look at my toes, nails picked so low.

Second – stop it, stop stopping and stop it instead, grab your pillowcase, your pillowcase fast, now, fucking grab it, bitch, fucking press, make it stop.

Third – Oh god, oh god, oh god.

Fourth – it’s not stopping. Solid dark, now, through the sheet. Through the white with little pink flowers, it’s slipping away, it’s all slipping away, and the fuzziness is literal now, is a cloth over my eyes and mouth and lungs, yet I am awake, I am awake and I am scared, and –

I called nine-one-one because it wouldn’t stop, told them where I lived while crying, humiliated, embarrassed, and then passed out on my bed, used tissues overflowing in the trashcan, clothes on the floor, stained underwear and a goddamn Naruto t-shirt, all kinds of humiliating things, crying, me crying, my hair unbrushed and my blood running out and all my mind could fill itself with was how pathetic I would look, how pathetic I would be, and how everyone would know, now, they would know.

The world hazed away. Misted away.

For a moment, I was something else, and I was solid. I took a breath and it was like honey, the sun was a living green thing warm on my face, the roots clung to me, I was ancient, I was real, and I knew, I was a thing that knew what it was.

And then I wasn’t.

Hospital lights too bright and metal, mercury flooding over the ceiling, lift my arm and there’s a strange pull – an IV, and I missed them putting it in, I always like to watch them put it in, I’ve never been scared of shots, I’ve looked closely down at each one as it enters my skin.

My mother was asleep and she looked punched. Two worry bruises, one beneath each eye, and I put them there. I looked at her for a long time – her breathing, slow and silent. Her hair in a wrap, her body swathed in the stretchy, comfortable, unattractive clothing reserved for the depressed, the athletic, and those in crisis. 

She breathed so softly. I snore, my father snores, but she exists in just whispered little exhales, the golden, dark glow of her skin the only organic thing in a room of sterile, hospital white. 

There was a crash, and I looked up, and it was a meal for two on the floor – wrapped sandwiches, two hot drinks, spilled now, one tea and one coffee, napkins stained up, plasticware scattered, and then up – my father, he had let out a noise like a wounded animal, held a hand to his mouth, and then dove for me, gathered me so tenderly up into his arms, and began to cry.

I am not small. I am not easy to gather. But my father is large, built like me, but the grown man edition – thick limbed, muscle and fat both easy to collect around the already bulky frame of thick, solid bones. People don’t look at him and think ‘cryer’ but he cries. In fact, he cries often. At movies, at birthdays, at weddings and funerals, and now, his bearded face buried in my hair, the sobs are like earthquakes rolling through him.

My mother had already gotten startled right awake by the clatter of the tray hitting the ground, and I remember then she had looked at me, we had made eye-contact over his arms, her face blank and empty, delicate dark features, a look of clear betrayal there – we are supposed to not do things like this, we are supposed to not make dad cry, we are supposed to protect him from the things that might make him cry, my mother, the willowy Vulcan, and me, the fucked up kid already caused them both a load of trouble when they’d tried so damn hard to do everything right.

But it had disappeared, even before my own eyes had swamped over with tears, even before I had started sobbing too, and she had gritted her teeth and stepped forward and joined us, a desperate, three-tiered tether, her to him and me to her and us to them, the pressure of their embrace on either side and each tear hitting me like acid, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry.

Never hurt yourself if someone loves you. Don’t hurt yourself either way is my solidly learn-ed advice, but if someone loves you, oh. Oh, no, no, no. Might as well just cut them twice as deep and harder, too, and be done with it. Don’t kid yourself. You already are.

“I’m sorry,” I kept saying. They were hugging me so tightly I shook, I vibrated with the intensity of their urge to keep me there, there, there. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you dare,” Mama said, because she was the one that could still talk, “Don’t you dare apologize. And don’t you dare ever, ever do it again, if you had told us, if we had known, we-” she broke off, a sob, one of her own rare sobs and Dad’s great arms gripped us both tighter, closer, like that would protect us. And I didn’t dare, but I said it anyway, again and again, and they brushed my tears away, brushed my hair from my face, tucked me in when I tired myself out with crying and apologies, rubbed my back like I was a baby again, being coaxed into sleep. 

We moved a few months after that. They said it was because they wanted to, but I knew it was because of me. They were good parents. They are good parents.

They knew I hated the city because I always complained about hating the city, made no secret about hating the city, the smells and the onslaught of socialization every time you step out the door and the metal, metal everywhere, but they’d always rolled their eyes, said that’s what my own adulthood would be for, my own choices, my own homes in whatever sticks town I chose. We had always stayed, but suddenly we were moving out to the tiny swampland town where we’d sometimes vacationed, a place I’d always loved and been happy at, and they were both claiming it was because of their own shit. Like Dad was eager to give up being head chef at Victoir’s to figure out new ways to cook alligator meat at Baywatch Bob’s, like Mom was eager to switch universities, go from head of the Physics department to new Professor, and start up a whole new lifetime of proving herself all over again.

Our house had three bedrooms with a washer and dryer in the kitchen. My room was a pale pink, and in the craigslist add, had held a cradle. I felt like I could still smell the infant in there, the soft human milk of her, the hair, the embryo. The dryer clicked, and the sink gave us water that tasted like algae. The porch was screened in, the sidewalk out front was cracked, warped where nature had taken it back, broken through the hasty slabs of concrete. Spanish moss hung like a curtain between us and our neighbors, and on a clear night, the sky was a milky, illuminated soup of galaxies where you could see it between the trees. 

I loved it. I felt so, so guilty, and I loved it so, so much. The air tasted right, here. It didn’t hurt to breathe, here. 

Then I ruined everything by finding The Rock.

The Rock With the Hole In It.

Warning: shit gets weirder from here on out.