When Push Comes to Shove

Pain is a funny thing. In all of my years I have never really understood it. Then again, how can one such as myself understand something that I have a very warped memory of? No, that’s not right. Not warped. More of distorted in relation to the rest of the human population. Yeah, that’s it. Distorted. Very, very distorted. Why? Well that’s a good question. If I knew, I would work on reversing the process. Instead I sit here with a surgical razor blade and hope with all my might that it will hurt more than I already do. That it will somehow help. That it will be tangible pain, unlike the kind I feel on a daily basis. Unlike the kind that I have grown slightly used to. I say slightly because if I had grown completely used to it, which I most definitely have not, I would not be sitting here, leaning against the door to by bedroom a week before I leave for my summer vacation. I would not be doing this absurd act of a crazy person. And that’s what I am. A crazy person. Now, don’t get me wrong, no one has ever called me crazy (except for my dad when he is joking). But I know I am. I am OCD. I know this. I am an angry person. I know this too. I have problems with depression. I know this as well. And, when you put all of these together, that makes me a crazy person. I have no problem being a crazy person, but it isn’t necessarily something that I am proud of. Simply accepting. Take right now for example; I am sitting in my room, a disaster in and of itself what with the lack of floor (hidden by mounds of stuff), and I am leaning against the door so that if anyone comes I can make myself decent. I have the razor in my right hand and my left calf is exposed. I put the razor to my skin. I push down. I pull back. One clean, straight, and approximately inch and a half line that hurts. But not enough. I put the blade down once more. I push. I pull. I bleed. Now there are two lines, symmetrical in every way, about a centimeter apart from each other. I do it again. And again. And again. Perfect and symmetrical, each line the same as the last. Now I could feel it. I could pinpoint the pain. I could say “It hurts here” instead of “It hurts all over”. It was a release of the emotions I had bottled up, a way to feel again. It got rid of that overwhelming fear that I couldn’t feel anything and it made my head hurt a little less.
Like I said, pain is a funny thing; who ever thought that I could ease it with more.

Conversations in my Head

My pen shook. Well, really my hand was shaking. If I put the pen, a black roller ball that I loved, on the paper it would have made little squiggles. I was tempted to do just that, but I couldn’t mess up the test. It was, after all, all nice and clean, not a mark on the smooth white paper. It was even warm, Mr. Payton must have made too few of copies and had to run off more just before this block. I didn’t want to mess it up. I didn’t want to write my name on the top, or even fake taking the test. I didn’t even want Mr. Patton to give me the test, but he ignored me, not wanting to make a scene out of it. That was okay, I could live with having handled the test. But I wasn’t going to write on it. Not even the answers that I knew, which he had assured there would be a few.
I was halfway through the block when my leg started going, violently shaking up and down. I tried to stop, but really I didn’t even want to. It calmed me down, even if only slightly so. With this thought I smiled at myself. I would have to tell mom that the next time that she yelled at me for shaking my leg.
At someone point after my leg started doing its thing, my stomach started to churn. It was yelling at me. If it had a voice I could imagine what it would be screaming. “What the hell were you thinking? Stress plus no food equals bad! You know that! Why the hell didn’t you eat this morning? Or even last night for that matter? You would think that after three years of this shit you would learn that that thing you call a brain makes me put out acid when you do stupid shit like this and if you don’t eat food it eats away at ME!”
My brain didn’t like that very much. It wasn’t its fault that its subconscious made my body do things. Like my hands shaking; they really don’t want to, my brain doesn’t really want them to, and yet there they go, vibrating like they are just aching to shake something. And it really doesn’t like it when my stomach tears itself apart over stupid tests, but it cant help that either.
My stomach wasn’t listening to my rational and calm explanation of things. It was still on freak out mode while the rest of me, my leg and my hands excluded, had gotten past that a few minutes into the test. The rest of me was on fuck this, I want to be sleeping right now mode. My hands wanted to strangled something. My leg wanted to go for a walk. My stomach wanted to tear a hole in itself. And I wanted everyone to shut up so I could think.