You have no idea how practiced you will become.

 

The first thing you used: purple child-sized craft scissors, their half-moon tips ribbed with hot glue. The first place was the inside of your left wrist perpendicular the stone-blue pulse.

These steps are a drumbeat you give yourself to, hypnosis in the click of the bathroom lock, socks whispered off, into the bathtub shivering. You, nearly thirteen, a naked offering to a silver god.

 

//

 

You dig. As if buried in the hook of your ulna was a red scepter, a moon-bright shore.

You don’t know what you are creating, pulled into you like the whimper of childhood’s basement stair. In those halls flooded an ocean – you dreamed it would swell at dusk and swallow you.

The crescent between your fingers holds a maple burn, a pale slice of fall.

 

//

 

No, you don’t know.

The dazed reunion with which your forehead meets stained tile.

That X-Actos grate with the sound of struck matches — your veins open best to Wilkinsons.

That at the ER you prefer arrowroots to saltines, sutures to staples, and doctors who remember to ask if it hurts.

The way your mother’s tears will give you a sun to hide under.

The shape of the empty room your mouth makes when you say no.

That the word for the harbour under your skin is subcutaneous. Or power. Or ritual.

 

//

 

Litres — the amount you can lose each day and still have breath to lose.

That stomach acid braided with clotted blood in the drain is only ablution.

Tasting salt, you run the water over your hands until the colours pale and numb.

 

//

 

The first time you cut yourself, you string a spider line of blood moons. You stand, wrist lifted, watching them tug at ancient, gaping tides.

 

//

 

Only the drops in the sink. The face in the mirror — how you chase the moment it contains you. Only the purple scissors and the plastic flaking like dry sand.

Only the waves’ breaking — if only.

 

Wounding. You have mastered this, too.