Because bloodletting can get you fired...

I’d almost forgotten how quickly my mood can plummet. Pitfalls of being bi-polar, I suppose. Two days ago I was hyper and happy and overall very pleasant. And today…

It’s almost been an entire year since I last cut, but I can feel the urge creeping towards me like an oil spill; at my toes, sliding up my leg and rustling my clothes, until I taste the metallic tint staining its fingers as it slides into my mouth. It reached down my throat, choking me and coercing tears out through an emotional gag reflex. It’s so similar to the reverse action of bleeding through dozens of criss-crossing slivers dancing across my skin, welling up and painting the snow with red.

Whenever I used to cut…it allowed me to focus. I was able to focus on that exact moment, on that specific action and I was able to finally slow my thoughts down enough to where I could rebuild whatever walls had been torn down. It was never about the pain. It was about the moment: the moment hanging slow and weightless as I drew the edge down my arm and felt the slight sting of separation. I’m a slow bleeder and I think I began cutting initially due to my fascination with the delay between severing skin and the first red line to greet open air. 5-8 seconds, usually. Just watching something that was inside of my slowly creep out of my body, into the world was enough to make the rest of the world stand still. Every time I drew the razor blade across my skin, I was giving birth to another frozen moment in time. Another wall. Another degree of separation between myself and the thoughts that bombard me at Mach Infinity.

I haven’t cut in 11 months and 22 days. But right now…I’m struggling. There’s just so many thoughts and they’re going so fast. Instead of walking to my dresser where I keep my art supplies and ripping open a pack of X-acto blades, instead I opened up a new Word document and started typing. It’s not nearly as effective, but it’s probably a million times healthier. Writing is one of my only remaining methods of focusing my thoughts down to a single path.

Like herding worker bees down a drinking straw.

My mind is a hive and every bee is a thought. And right now, a group of kids is beating the hive with some very large, very significant sticks. Each stick is labeled.

Missouri.
Job.
Money.
College.
Friends.
Loneliness.
Restlessness.

Prospects of a way out...bashing my skull in. I promised her I wouldn’t cut. The bitch. I promised so many of my Winthrop friends that I’d no longer cut, but it’s her to whom I actually swore to. And now? She won’t even talk to me. Apparently I’ve got too many issues and too many problems and my very existence is too stressful for her. Stressful!? For her!? Honestly!? I wonder how long she’d last AS me.
The day I realized that not only did I no longer love her but WHY I no longer loved her, I felt the most immense surge of freedom I’d ever known. But there’s still one chain, one string, one goddamn shackle.
My promise.

I don’t break my promises. But for fuck’s sake, right now I wish I did.

On the other hand…this is temporary. I am bi-polar after all. Some time tonight or tomorrow or so, something, some random, unrelated thing will trigger a shift and I’ll be back to myself. But as always, smack dab in the middle of the months, I go through one of these 2 or 3 day spells of morose depression. This actually started yesterday…but somehow I was able to hold it at bay until about 30 minutes ago when I suddenly realized I don’t have a shoulder to lean on or an embrace to cry into.

Where have all the shoulders gone? I’m not talking that metaphorical bullshit that people refer to when they’re really only talking on the phone. I mean a real physical shoulder to lean on. I’m a very physically intimate, emotive person. I want somebody to hug me, to hold me. I want someone to not say single word but instead just lay with me and put their arms around me and just let the quiet embrace heal what a thousand razor blade designs can’t. A razor blade cannot cure the lonely. And right now, neither can I.

I won’t cut. I’ll keep my promise. But right now, I really wish I could. Maybe my loneliness will go away when I move to Missouri, but something tells me I need to go farther north. I have no idea where, but it’s snowing in my dreams and there are mountains. That leaves plenty of choices: all of Canada and a good third of America. I’m not bullshitting myself; I know that Missouri is just a waypoint, a place to stay for a few years to finish college before I finally go Home. HOME. Where the fuck I BELONG. Wherever the hell that is. I know it’s not here and I know it’s not Missouri. But at least in Missouri I have a least one real friend and a method of finishing school. Beth also knows people who know people and she can’t let me meet those people and maybe make a new set of friends. As much as I love and adore and cherish my online friends…right now, it’s just not enough. I’m lonely. Lonelier than I remember being in nearly a decade.

Right now, someone holding my hand would probably be enough.

Why the fuck am I such a girl? For all my physical strength and masculine skills and hobbies, I can’t relate to guys. I can’t think like them. I don’t even view sex like a guy. Apparently I think like a woman. I can understand women; they make sense to me. Maybe it’d be simpler if I were gay. But I’m not. I don’t think I’m allowed that kind of simplicity. I was born as a living, breathing testament to the universal Catch-22. I am the 22 year old Catch-22. Here’s a fucking autograph.

It all comes back to the fact that I want a hug. And I don’t know a single person within 50 miles who I feel comfortable hugging anymore. Maybe I’m being picky, but I can’t just let anybody across this drawbridge. And what kind of cosmic joke would it be if when I get to Missouri, I don’t feel comfortable hugging Beth? Then it’s 1,100 miles instead of 50. But I have to take that risk. I can’t live in the Deep South much longer. I’m stagnating here and I’m deathly afraid of it. Anywhere but here, yeah?

Fuck. I hate promises.