[warning: self-harm]
The world is fragmentary and distorted the first time you take a razor to your skin. You don't start high up the arm, but close to the wrist, where the world can see. You're already covered in scars, and you're thinking it won't hurt. Nothing hurts.
The razor has a nick in it, so the line isn't perfectly straight, but the bubbling up of blood seems clean somehow, easy, easier than anything else has been for the past year. The world keeps getting darker, driving deeper into hell, and you can't stop it. You've let yourself fall into it, head first, and the only thing that stops the burning in you is when you're out on the streets, venting a little of that fire and brimstone onto other people, the ones so much like the men who destroyed your life, your love, and who you were.
You're nothing, now. You're not even an empty shell. You're a puppet, dragged along by the strings of your own tendons. When you play music, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard, and you recite old poetry you used to try to remember for her because it makes the world slow a little, teaches it order.
So does the line on your arm. You're on the windowsill of this filthy apartment in a city you never thought about moving to until you couldn't stand to stay in your own. It's raining, as always, and you push the window up, extend your arm out into the downpour, let it wash away the blood, let the water sink into the vein like it will get you clean.
You don't know why you're still alive, why you didn't die, why you haven't killed yourself yet. But here you are, sitting on a windowsill, the raindrops spitting pink spatters onto the white tile below your feet, and you think that if you feel nothing else in your life, if you never have love again, you'll at least go to your grave knowing pain better than anyone has ever known it. You put the razor to your skin again, and you pull.