By Lena Zeller
CW: Mentions of self-harm and suicide
The thorns always come first.
I can feel them growing under my skin weeks in advance. But inside me they could still be anything. Could be nothing. Could be cancerous.
They don’t hurt before they pierce flesh. They only incubate. Some twinges here and there. Growing pains. Contractions. Nausea, every time I touch where I think one may be.
I am not supposed to pull them out to get it over with faster.
I drink a cup of herbicide every morning.
I always think I know when they will cut through skin. I never do.
I collapse on the floor of the grocery store like a child throwing a tantrum. I forget people can see me. The whole world is sharp and my body is the whole world.
The doctor says there is nothing he can do. I show him a clinical study I found on the internet, and he says they aren’t testing on women yet, and I don’t spit in the face of the messenger, but I want to.
I say, Take all of my punctured organs and make me empty and clean.
He says, Keep drinking your poison. You know it will work eventually. Don’t mind if it kills anything you actually need.
As a kid I didn’t understand why people put down their dogs. Isn’t it better to be alive, and to suffer? Isn’t it better to be alive? I miss the naivety of childhood. I am my own dog and I will cradle myself to the end.
I go to work and do everything I normally do, except sometimes I have to run to throw up saplings, and sometimes I have to lie down—only my body won’t move, so I just sit stiff as taxidermy.
It hurts to swallow through my pierced throat. People say I look beautiful. People say, Have you lost weight?
The vines grow, thorns piercing flesh piercing skin, piercing my organs, and allegedly I will survive this, allegedly I have before.
I am grotesque.
I fantasize about the hospital, about making my body somebody else’s problem. But the reality of the shame and the IV drip and peeing in front of a nurse is worse than lying on the kitchen floor.
There are others who are like me. In online forums, and medical studies, and hiding in doctors’ offices. Only I have never met any of them, so they aren’t real, and I am alone.
My body eats itself, cannibalizing nutrients for the vines that grow in me. My body won’t allow me to eat it. I bite the plants and they are poisonous, and at the ICU they asked me why I bit into the plant they told me was poison, and I tell them, Because it is my poison, and then pass out.
I try to disassociate from my body, but the pain cannot be tricked.
Assisted suicide seems too mortifying to bear. All my insides bare, spilled out for everyone to see. Regular suicide will do. If I ever get up from pressing my face against the tiles.
Thou shalt not suffer it to live and by it I mean my body. My body is not me. They should suture the nerves in my brain that signal pain. I bite into my arm until it bleeds and the nerves in my brain are too busy screaming at everything else to take note. I make myself throw up bile. I hit my head against the wall, but that mechanism that prevents me from biting my own finger off prevents me from bashing my skull in. They should suture the part of my brain that keeps me from bashing my own skull in.
I grieve my body, my alive body, my vile, autonomous body.
I take a knife to it.
Photograph by Circe Denyer (public domain)