I’m cold as cold as cold can be

[Pippi]

It was a bad look, yes, one near impossible to explain away. But it could be. It could be justified, and it could be explained, and you just needed to listen, and then go away, and then think it through, and then you would, maybe, understand why it really wasn’t so awful as it looked at first glance.

It wasn’t self harm. Not really. Not at all, actually.

Because self harm was the sort of thing you did all hidden away in secret, out of sight of anyone, clutching a razor blade you’d hidden discretely inside of your rolled-up long sleeves. Not standing in the middle of your brightly lit kitchen, door wide open, knife held brazenly in your hand like it had always been there and there was nothing out of the ordinary. If you were gonna try and hurt yourself, then you would be petrified of someone walking in on you, right? Of course you would. So this couldn’t be anything of the sort.

(He was choosing to ignore the fact that his da was out on his boat right now, bobbing up and down on the slate grey waves, while his ma was staring down the barrel of yet another bottle of Merlot, and so despite the fact she was in the living room just down the hall right now, he was as alone as if he’d locked himself up in the bathroom and switched off the lights)

And of all the knives you could choose, it wouldn’t be a bread knife, would it? Why would you pick something with no proper sharp edge, just a row of needle thin points,

(Because he was scared)

And press them just into the soft flesh on the back of your wrist and hand

(Because he was so fucking scared)

If you really wanted to hurt yourself?

(Because he was so goddamn fucking scared that he would go too far if he picked up anything else, that the tidal wave of sheer self-disgust would crash down and blot out any sight of rationality or hope, that his brain would scream as loud as it could that there was only one way out of the prison cell that this two-story townhouse had become, that he just wanted, needed, that sudden shock to bring him back down to earth, a sharp point to cut through the cloud of voices in his head and make him feel clarity and shame once again)

This wasn’t the first time this had happened. It probably wouldn’t be the last. But that wasn’t, really, a bad thing either. Everybody got stressed out, didn’t they? Everybody had days where they got mad and upset at themselves, and so everybody had ways of reacting to these moments, methods they used to bring themselves back to a measure of normality. This wasn’t yoga, or exercise, or deep breathing, no, but it was also just bad luck that the opportunity to go up to the coast and breathe in the sea breeze and let the salt water wash over you and drink in the setting sun had snapped shut for tonight. And taking everything into account, a second or two of sharp pain, and the slight chance to receive tiny little pin pricks on your skin that you could chalk up to sand flea bites, well, that wasn’t drinking your sorrows away, or sitting in a cloud of marijuana smoke, was it? It wasn’t that. It wasn’t anything close to that.

(Because it had to get better, it had to, he didn’t know how, the idea was just some nebulous, shapeless mass on the horizon, but he had to be able to find a way to reach out and grab it)

And most importantly, this probably wasn’t even an incredibly rare occurrence. There were probably dozens of people at school, maybe even more than that, who did things like this. With a needle. With the point of a compass. They probably didn’t even think about it for a second, knew that it was nothing at all to worry about. How unlikely was it that only one person in the world did this, after all? It was impossible. Nobody ever talked about it, because it would be like telling someone that you had breathed earlier in the day. It wasn’t worth mentioning.

(It was the same thing he told himself to justify why he kept on dreaming and daydreaming and zoning out about waking up one day with long and pretty hair, and nicer hips and nicer legs, and boobs, not even particularly big ones, just enough, and why he kept on sneaking into his parents’ room and silently opening his ma’s side of the wardrobe to try on her dresses and skirts and tights and anything else he could get his hands on. It was normal, it had to be. The other boys in his class did it too, he couldn’t be the only one. It was just idle fascination, curiosity, wonder over ‘what would it be like if I did look like this?’ Nothing more. It was normal, he was normal, he was a boy who dreamed, just like all the other boys at school)

(And wasn’t it curious, wasn’t it funny, so fucking funny, how his brain so easily forgot this when it wanted to, how it let him know how much of a disgusting creep he was, how much of a freak he was, whenever he was at his lowest ebb, telling him how he needed to punish himself for being such a worthless little shit, failing to even acknowledge the depths of its own hypocrisy)

There. See? Nowhere near as bad as a single, uninformed glance might have suggested. All done in a flash. The knife would be lazily dumped into the plastic washing-up bowl in the sink, a Peperami and a glass of milk would be retrieved from the fridge, and the lights in the kitchen would all switch off. Nobody would have to know a thing.

Nobody would ever know.