he pulled me to the floor and slipped my fingers into his. ’shhh…he’s watching’ he whispered in my left ear as he breathed hard against my back. i could feel the heat radiating across his chest, the sweat slicking my dress to my back as he hugged me close to him. sticky breath on my exposed shoulder and his fingers laced in mine. leaning back slowly, my back filled the cavity of his chest and i slipped my mind into the endless deviation that he creates for me.

i have been running recently away from him and the person he created me into. he’s tired of his plaything, and he wants me back. in the past i would have gone back to him with arms held open, but i am now a changed girl…the bruises and the cuts have healed and my heart has grown blacker with each passing day. he has been replaced and the man who breathes across my exposed shoulders is replacing the only man i have ever exposed my soul to.

its funny that we have come full circle and that i am rejecting the man who I had craved for years, for someone who i refuse to expose my past to. this new man…he watches me with a genuine awe that makes my heart beat faster…the way he holds my hand, one long pinky finger linked with mine makes me melt into a unfinished gelato…creamy and smooth. he has yet to actually touch me in a way that is inappropriate, but his voice on the crackling phone makes me smile.

who is watching me? and how does this warm body know i’m being watched? i wonder…

should i be concerned? or afraid?

i wish my body would make up its mind…

its a new feeling…this rawness…that my heart has left while it bled out…instead of an open wound. an open wound i could dress and tie up in a pretty bow…but this is something i can not contain or touch. it hurts to suck in breath, and the fact that i have not eaten anything solid in a week is not really helping me function…

i have sinned so badly my parents are afraid to leave me alone in the house. they found out a few days ago…they realized that my raping, my addictions and my talks of him were not fake, but so real that i bear the marks on my body. my hips have the claw marks of my many constitutional users, but who can blame them? they have tried to talk me out of coming back to that dirty mattress, the old man actually begged me to go home one night when i showed up two hours early, but i waited with a glass of water and my head on my knees…i am unbelievably tainted. old traditions come into play…questions have no answers. they have rightly questioned everything that i am…my being and my soul…the funny thing is that i have no real answers to give them. i have none to give myself.

how can they understand the relationship that i have had with him? the depraved and insistent love that i found in him, has completed me. i am incomplete only in the essence that he is no longer here in my wake, but he has given me something that many do not have access to…he has given me the ability to be ME..in my purest, rawest and natural sense. i am broken, but functional because i have finally realized that i can live on without having a sane look on life. i can move forward because of the people who depend on me…there is life that i have to grab a hold of and rip apart with my bare shaking teeth, because my hands tremble when i look at them.

i am skewed in my perception and realize that i have no sense of boundaries…which is interesting because as a child i lived within constructed boundaries. the need to fit in is gone…it is now the need to not fall apart, which is surprisingly more harder to achieve. there is no magic cure…my dreams are harsher and bloodier than ever before. my carving has stopped because i have been banned on punishment of being disowned…i am no longer allowed to carve and release what ever i can because my parents refuse to have me mutilate myself.

i am more concerned about my youngest love…she has been moulded in my image…we are so alike it is frighting. i know what path she will walk on, and i refuse to have her hurt as i have. she is adept with her blades – her collection is quite impressive for someone so little. she is craving a pain so harsh that she will walk through hell to get it, but she has no idea why she is craving it. i know the hell that will open up before her, and i do not want her beautiful flesh to be carved as mine. she is an innocent who is taking things at face value and believing what is out there…i want to protect her and save her from turning into something i’m afraid of most…ME.

he has moved on…i saw him today in the subway with his hands around her fingers…laced with arsenic i wanted to move in…and rip her fingers off his beautiful body. i seethe when i look at her…his new toy…she wears her scars with pride. her legs show new cuts…the pattern is amazing to look at, his hands are much steadier now.

two years…i have waited for him…my alley visits have left me tattered and destroyed, but i still go for my constitutional raping…the men who visit me are my regulars…they were brutal when they began, but as they realized i would come back again and again…empathy took over. humankind is a strange species…once we fulfill our primal sexual needs, grunting and brutal…mankind feels for the limp body that he has ripped apart. there is a fear now…they are afraid of me actually being here…they do not understand why i keep coming back…every night, at the same time…they wait for me in a jagged line.

i flutter between consciousness and madness when they come at me in droves…they are methodical, and have imposed rules on the way the game is played. they do not touch my face or my breasts…they only slam into my rawness and leave. i have no need to remind them about condoms….the old man who waits for me on the air mattress that they have laid down for me insists that they all have condoms on. this is my punishment. i have been such a whore to patodia and many others…this is my penance…my reward.

he knows this….he has come to watch me, i know this because i can feel his heartbeat thumping madly in my veins. no one loves like this without being in tuned to each others bodies…i know when he sucks on her taunt nipples…i can taste the latent milk in my mouth. i want to spit it all out…but i crave his touch so i swallow because i am tainted.

he has turned me into a depravation…a ’serial conversationalist’ as my siblings have taken to calling me. i think they say that because they are afraid of saying the ‘w’ word…that they think that i have crossed the line and am a whore. patodia passed by me at the grocers yesterday and he did a double take. my figure has finally become what i always wanted it to be…the space between my legs is raw and damaged, but the rest of me is clean and beautified. i feel whole…physically. patodia tried to remember me as i watched him from the corner of my left eye standing in front of the apples. when i softly touched his elbow in the soup aisle, he practically shouted out…

the tables have turned and the roles are reversed…his left hand has a tell tale tan and he is shopping in a small cart instead of a trolley. i am amused and intrigued. two years have changed both of us…i am shattered and incomplete, but have a sense of balance in my madness. he is shattered and completely broken…i wanted to hold his hands and tell him that i would always be there for him. he was silent for a good two minutes as he stared at my face…i smiled for him and as realization dawned…he smiled back and laughed softly. i had forgotten how beautiful he looked when he smiled…

he left me in a lurch at the crossing gate…’wait here for me’ was the last thing he whispered as i pulled him deep into my body, clutching his soul with my shivering hands. i knew he was going to leave…but i held on because i was naive and blinded by the ar-rhythmic beating of my heart. i stood there with my back exposed to the passing cars…blood sliding over the scar tissue, mixing with the saliva and piss on the alleyway. the olfactory explosion was the only thing that kept me awake that first night…breaking down the scents of the stains on the scratched red brick wall i was facing…it was like a little game i played as tears blurred my vision.

my body was in tatters…his last session had left me completely spent. i stood…wavering between absolute collapse and orgasmic highs…my fingers dug into my forearms as i stood waiting. i waited and waited till dawn broke…i waited even though my knees buckled under stress…i waited patiently as the three high school boys found me on their way school at 7:45am the next morning…who brutally raped me in turns…holding my limp bleeding wrists down with doc marten boots…i waited silently.

i waited silently…and i know i most probably wait some more by the side of this road…in this alleyway, brutalized by the men who stalk about here…i wait silently…for my irregular heart beat to start up again…

i have changed…slightly and metaphysically. i am no longer bound by tradition and ‘what will people say’. i am bound not by mothering instincts, demonic desires and insane pleas of sexual favors…i am bound by nothing. i have been moving around, pushing further and further than i thought possible…but i am lost at sea. i have no tether…i am lost…floating in a void of misconstruction and lies. i feel lost…

he has disappeared from my life. i have no ritual bleeding to attend to, no right of passage that i must suffer through…no desires that are being fulfilled. he left me like a thief in the night: covertly with black fingerless gloves…leaving tattered prints on my bruised body. i have been carving maliciously recently…but to no avail. i bleed when i stand…my legs buckle under the stress that i have induced. i have been sitting on my hotel bathroom floor…blades at the ready…i throw up a little and cut slightly deeper into my thigh…

my dresses are in shambles…i refuse to have them lengthened because i miss him…he has ripped me apart and i simmer in the heat of summer waiting for him on the doorstep of the gallery. the leather shops and alley ways hold my gaze no longer…i need him inside my mind. he has always been the only thing that drove me to my highs and guided me with surgical precision through my lows…i have nothing left to bleed…i am rotted and dried from inside…

i stopped smiling a long time ago, patodia does not understand this wretched husk that slams doors and shivers in the intense heat…it is hard for me to function, to be alive and breathe…to pretend that i am alright. i have been having horrific dreams….things…things that i can not even fathom when i am awake…i stopped sleeping some time ago. i run on caffeine and drugs, trucker pills by the bottle full…i thrive in career and on the surface, but i am losing in life. i have sacrificed myself time and again…and yet here i am…waiting on my knees…ready to be lead to the back of the barn to be dismembered. now…if i can only find someone brave enough to wield the rusty blade…

he took my innocence in the first minutes he actually touched my body…his fingers laced into the raven hair that covered my bleeding face. i knew he would break me, but the savage way he had pinned me to the floor had shocked the both of us. he was brutal and furious…his fingers shoved into my trembling body like a piston, he pumped and i bleed…i shook with the impact, my fingers bracing my body against the hard brick wall…my fingers and hands raw from the friction burns. i was his and his alone, he had claimed me like a rag doll…he shook me from corner to corner, my limbs and hair fluttering limply in the bristling autumn gale…

i had begged patodia to up my medication for the past three visits, and he had only put off the conversation again and again. today as i stood in front of him in his plush office, i had mindlessly taken of my shoes and slung my exposed legs over the chair arm. my legs on display…i had told patodia about him…how he had been stalking my every move for the past three weeks, how a simple hello had turned into metaphysical conversation of religion and self sacrifice…how he had asked about my opinion of bodies and space…of cutting and blood…of suicide and eternal damnation…of love and the lustful desire of the perverted psychopath…how he had stared into my hazel eyeballs and had whispered ‘u and i are alike…but u are a blank canvas that i can work on…u have yet to be formed, and the man who carves u will be lucky’…i had breathed in deep, i felt like ice had been coursing through my veins. i bleed that night, but i shivered as i cut, my fingers unsteady for the first time…

patodia only shook his head and stared at my legs. patodia has been discouraging me from meeting him…patodia has been a more of a lover recently, one who has yet to touch my body, but has made love to my mind though his prose and his insight. he stood up, visibly upset at my mention of this new man in my life, and as he circled the chair i was sprawled on…patodia’s fingers brushed against my right thigh and…stopped…his warm fingers slowly ran down my right leg. his touch was as light as a breeze…i sighed softly and closed my eyes, my body arching in the chair…forgetting for a second where i was as instinct took over. patodia’s left hand slid up my leg…closer to the ruffled hem of my skirt, and as he moved his fingers under the hem…i sat up straight.

this was the second time patodia had purposefully touched my body…the first time was in the empty stairway of the morgue…the electric shock of that touch had shattered both of our illusions, and we both knew that this was a dangerous path we were ignoring each other on. now his fingers moved under a spell of their own, his face betraying the absolute shock that he was feeling…i could see it on his face, he was as confused as i was. he snatched away his wandering hand, and wrapped his hands around his body…i pulled my legs into me and i looked away. my heart was pounding in my throat…my body lit like a raging oil field, liquid pooling in my body….my fingers snapped around my trembling legs like clamps. he wrote something on his notepad with his back to me…i glanced over and saw him tremble…his left hand against the table, his wedding ring winking at me. we had crossed a line…his body betrayed him, the same way my body craved him…i shivered in the leather chair…i had to leave before i destroyed a family…

i stood up…gathered my shoes and bag, and as i walked quietly to the door…i felt a hand on the small of my back. patodia turned me around and kissed me ferociously…sucking in my breath and sealing his lips around mine…i moaned and he pulled me closer…our bodies stumbling into each other awkward and clumsy. his hands around my hips, he pulled me closer to him, his body leading me towards the chair i had just vacated. my fingers sliding down his back and in the tangle of limbs…i made contact with his hands, and for a second my fingers brushed against the cool metal of his left hand. i pushed his chest away from my body, breaking the kiss.

panting, we looked at each other…desire and horror mixed in our eyes, drunk on the kiss we stood in a glass room…the mirrors showing us the tandem thresholds we had crossed. still holding my shoes and bag, i ran to the heavy wooden door and stumbled into the hallway. wild eyed and jaded, i ran through the hallway…ignoring the stares of the nurse and the other waiting patients…i ran from the un-crossable lines…relationships i had never meant to complicate…i had crossed a line, and i would lose someone who i trusted…i ran because i knew what this would mean… i ran because i had finally become what i despised, a whore.

as realization dawned on me, i stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and surveyed the scene. i was standing in the middle of downtown, in a purple dress…barefoot, running blindly. i slumped down and i laughed hysterically…i laughed at my stupidity…i laughed at the way fate played games with me…i laughed because i was a slut. i laughed because the other alternative would have broken me. i laughed because i knew not what else to do.

i wanted to cry out loud…to march up to his laughing face and claw his eyes out today…i wanted him to scream, and beg me to stop…i wanted him to become ‘emotional’. i wanted him to bleed…i wanted him. i sat there and watched him talk to his friend, his back to me while his friend watched my every motion and expression. i am so transparent…my face displays my ‘wants’ like a billboard on a freeway. i drank my soy latte, a phat beat courtesy of jam master jay pulling me towards oblivion.

he broke my heart…crudely on the subway as we tunneled furiously towards my waiting family. he left me frustrated in my red car, my heart bleeding on the pavement as he slid into his waiting ride and drove off. i sat there and in a daze called my hysterical mother, told her i would see her the next day and i drove. i drove the whole night…ecstatic and mindless…i drove and when my vision blurred from the water that seeped silently from my eyes…i drove some more.

my brother finally found me holed up in a seedy motel three days after he shattered my senses…i called him at midnight from the payphone. i had run out of steam…i was completely ripped apart at the seams. he had come in a rush, afraid of my affinity to suicide…he drove for fourteen hours straight to get me home. kevin and my brother banged on the motel door..i listened to his begging and pleading…’open the door, hon…please’. i sat there, my fingers raw and bloody and finally whispered into the eerie silence…’it’s open…it’s always open for u homes’.

i have never heard my brother scream out in my life…but that crisp august morning, i think the whole sleepy hamlet heard a hoarse cry rise out from a 22 year old throat…crackling like gun fire. he slammed me on to the floor and wrestled away the blades…my fingers and hands an intricate artwork of bleeding lines. kevin stood there..he watched me in awe…i sat on a purple clotted patchwork sheet outlined only with fresh burgundy. on my stomach, i had been cutting my hands for the past four hours…my body draped over the bed, my feet bleeding over the edge of the bed…pooling on the floor in a crusty pile.

i was in the hospital for three weeks after that bastard broke my heart…he lied to me at every turn, pretending to be someone he never intended to truthfully become. i bleed crimson tears for him…scar tissue on my body will never allow me to walk onto a beach without causing a ruckus. patodia put me back on the higher dose, and i swam in my mind for a good chunk of time.

i saw him again on the subway today…and picked at the scar on my right arm…i bleed crimson for him, but i have no colour left in me today. today i will bleed black…i have no light left anymore. i function and form because i must, because i am grateful, because i have life in my womb…and…because i finally have nothing else to offer my creator, except the shallow breath i suck up like candy.

i have nothing else to give…i am spent…i have been living on carefully spelt out prayer…but i have no love for faith and no real belief…i run empty…i am a shade of the girl he broke…i am a blackened shade of my former self…i am…

today, it seems this urge to purge myself has set in, in a longing to be free of my demons and haunting. it is an uphill battle, up a slippery slope of laughter and ridicule…but one that i desperately want to climb up. with my stones around my neck, i have managed to take a few feeble steps up this gigantic slope, but it seems every time i think i have made progress, i fall back on my back…sprawled and hurt with this looming climb towering over me…this image has started to keep me up at night and i am tired of these images in my mind, playing on a constant reel of epic trailers…fighting to control myself is like trying to squeeze dry play dough into a broken straw.i know it can be done, but by the gods that mirthfully scowl at us humans… it can not be done by me.

my illusions of self have been shattered, by my own hand…but it is in the constant willowing of self pity and pathos that has lead to this…isn’t it? i do not understand this need…this purging of self, both mentally and physically…the control that i have on the food and thoughts i take in is absolute, but i still purge, viciously. retching out my guts i get a sense of peace. as i sit on my tiled floor among the spittle, debris and fallen hair…compiling lists of things that have yet again gone wrong in my life.

there are never ending lists, things that i know will never get done…but yet i write them, putting down my ‘to do’ wants, needs, desires and illusions…they collect in my bag, my agenda and my books; mocking me in their listings…mocking my lack of execution and pseudo attempts at ‘following through’. it is this execution that has always alluded me…i can plan and create with the best of them…but execution and acting upon these guidelines…this i can not do, nor do i have any drive to complete.

its been some time since i’ve written anything on a regular basis, but it seems that i have been falling into a nonsensical rut…i feel like i’m crashing and burning. patodia urges me to write…but i am afraid to expose so much…he keeps urging me to talk to him, but recently the madness that is my life has shut me down. the ever increasing dosages are forcing my mind to do flip-flops…i am afraid that i will reject it all…its been a creation of my own hands, this pit that i have fallen into. emotional highs and lows carted together on a never ending see-saw, my own created demons taunting me to get off this hell ride. but yet i cling on for dear life, refusing to budge from what is obviously a bad situation. why has it come to this…have i truly gone off the deep end to have my life fall down around me in a mess of few too many un-kept promises to others and shattered images of self that i refuse to even look at, now that they have been exposed as my own creations?

has my mind gone blank, what am i honestly doing here in this space…clinging to my juvenile delusions of ‘fitting in’ with the popular people, and ‘finally getting it right’. i know that this is not me, it has never been me…i have been always far too removed from the ‘normal’ people, and it is not a dream that i should be chasing at my age. but yet, here i am…begging to be seen as part of their group, any group for that matter. i am standing unclaimed…but i watch from the distance…i need to belong…

i am lost…my body has been tempted and mistreated for far too long. the temptation, fetishes and now the added on pills have long ago shown me their ways and effects on my psyche and my body, but new things have crept in. images that i have always tried to adhere to are finally in my grasp, but i succumb to the weakness of my self-sabotaging mind and have created new demons who taunt me in my waking hours and have now crept into my sleep…

my new fixation has shifted from my never ended need to harm myself to the control over intake…be it food, water or anything. this is new…food is an enemy now, the constant ebb and flow of these morsels i put in my mouth is starting to retch out of my system, by my own hand…i know this is not what i should do…but it feels so right. i have control…control of something that is mine, and mine alone. far too long have i gone, moving to the drum beats of those around me, but this is my creation, my baby if you will. this is my fight against me, and by god i will win it, even if it kills me.

i know not if anyone will read this and relate, but i am compelled to write. the forced upon isolation in my own mind is driving me crazy.. i feel like i’m losing a battle i should not even be fighting…yet here i am.

he moved his fingers closer to my thigh as my fingers tried pulling his frame closer to mine…icy fingers left goose bumps as they slid up my left leg, my skin alternatively being scorched and then repeatedly dunked in ice cold water. he has been teasing me like this since he sat down on my bed…his fingers lace with arsenic under the flimsy hospital gown that hides my frame.

they had moved me into my own room since the last time he had visited me, after my mother had insisted that i be isolated from the other crazies, because ‘her daughter obviously was not one of them’…and patodia had gently laughed in her face, making my father square his massive shoulders threateningly. i felt like an abandoned toddler at a lonely park, my caretakers all fighting amongst themselves for custody…i did what i did at the age of five…i wandered off through the hallways.

panicked, they had all scattered through the different halls…nurses, doctors, aides and my frantic siblings…they all were like rats trying to find the moving cheese. patodia found me in the end…in the stairwell near the morgue. i had been watching the cadavers being covered and uncovered for the past three hours…families learning that death had snatched away their loved and unloved ones. human emotion is a fickle thing, we pretend to ‘feel’ something when we are being watched…but turn the lights and cameras off and the truth slowly flickers out. i watched a woman’s derange smile, her teeth glistening a bright white in the gloom as she gleefully watched the aides peel off the covers of an old man. i imagined disgusting things…things that would make someone smile so blissfully…being done to that woman. i imagined her on the floor begging to be forgiven, his hard fingers slamming her head against the floor repeatedly. i imagined her sobbing softly as he heaved himself over her limp body, thrusting repeatedly into her bleeding cunt. i imagines her naked on the floor, bruised and battered…watching the belt whiz down. i imagined me…

when patodia touched me, i screamed out loud…i had seem him approach me, but i had never expected him to actually touch my body. it was an electric shock…an instant reaction, unabashed he had smiled, pointed to the morgue and placed his index finger of his right hand on his lips…like i was a child. i wanted to yell…i wanted to scream…i wanted him to rip me apart. i stood there dumb and…as he held my hand and lead me to the elevator, i answered the question he had posed to me the night before.

‘because i deserve it…because i am dirty, because i must be punished’

he looked at my lowered eyes, shock so blatant and unmasked on his chiseled face…for a second his mask had fallen out of place. he was a man, a jumbled up mass of clay, blood and latent ideas…he was human and vulnerable…he shivered as he reached the elevators…his hands slid slowly to the control panel. he had know what i know now…he had fed his need maliciously taking from those he tried to help…his need in turn has shaped him.

he was in the same place as me. he struggled to replace the shattered mask…but i had seen his hesitation. i knew that he would never ask me that unanswerable question of ‘why’ again…his mask in some effect covered his flittering eyes….and the double doors to the elevator closed with a audible sigh. he and i were on the same ground…dirty and needy…we both knew where this madness would lead, but we kept silent…our bodies sliding closer in the gleaming metal box.