(no subject)

When I was a girl, I developed what was maybe a strange habit. I would take both hands, pinch the skin on the sides of my stomach, and lift it as far upward as I could. Then I would hold it there until my fingers cramped or spasmed, and I'd have to let go.

It hurt, but it felt, while I was holding that skin away from me, as if I'd lifted one of the worst weights anyone could have punished me with, too, and it was a relief. The feeling of that weight settling on me again was almost enough to make me cry.

I broke the habit as I got older, but I took up a worse one - I took to bleeding. More refined sensations, same relief and release, plus it was more powerful - instead of just lifting the weight, bleeding let me punish myself for it, let me destroy without anyone caring. And the weight didn't make itself felt again so quickly after I bled. Sometimes, if I bled enough, it would be a week before I stopped feeling floaty and weightless.

I haven't bled or wanted to bleed in some time, now. Not as much time as you might think, but still, some time. But tonight I'm thinking about it (not thinking about doing it, just thinking about it in the abstract) because I've got that urge to peel away my skin again, to open myself up.

zibblsnrt posted lyrics, awhile back, to a song called Hymn to the Breaking Strain. It compares humans to bridges, to buildings, to steel... I think it's wrong. When I think of humans, and a few in particular, I think of glass. We bear weight. We bear incredible weight, as a matter of course. It's the blows, not the weight, that usually cause us to shatter. But still... sometimes I want to run away, I want to shake myself and watch everything fall away. And to stand there, bare to view, and take the measure of myself.

This I am. This I am made of. This is part of me. This is what I became when the fires blasted me, and over there is the mould, and when I have passed through the fires still to come, that is what they will make of me. That will be the shape of me, but it will not be me, because I am more than my shape. That will be my image, but neither will it be me. This... this is me.

It's impossible. I can't stand outside myself, to gain that view and that surety. I can't lift away my skin long enough or even lay myself open deeply enough, verbally or otherwise, to be rid of the things that make me opaque to myself and at best translucent to everyone else. No matter how loudly the voice inside me screams that, like every human, I was given a spirit meant to glow fire-bright and to flow like any quicksilver thing for as long as the inner flame burns.

But I'm tired of the limitations of my skin tonight.

( Hymn to the Breaking Strain, Leslie Fish - lifted verbatim from Zib. )