From time to time, I begrudge residence in the same recurring dream (or daydream, I can never really recall or tell which). It is perhaps not so much a dream as a flickering and progressing visual; it holds an aesthetic that one might expect to see in some fear-inducing, black-and-white surrealist horror film. With blades held tightly, one between the fingers and thumb of each hand, I slash at my own face. Disfiguring it. Mutilating it. I don’t stop; I want to do it; it is an urge or is at least birthing satisfaction. My head is flung violently from side to side in physical repulsion. Despite the growing number of gashes, my weary mind leaves the scene bereft of blood, a tragic sympathy. Before long, my sharp flailing limbs find a relative calmness, an ability to use precision. Is the sickening picture that follows an act of Oedipal motivation or Dalian homage? Sterile straight lines drag across, dividing my eyes into furless peaches. The scene is black. Despite my third-person perspective of the horror, with my eyes, jointly goes my sight.

I may say “I begrudge residence” in this dream, but, strictly speaking, this is untrue. Of course, this quite objectively unpleasant idea struck a stomach-churning and skin-itching fear into me the first few times it intruded my mind, leaving me rather breathless and terrified. Yet, over the several years now I have known this dream, I have become accustomed to it—even warm to it, for its familiarity produces a twistedly alluring comfort.

Once I began to recognize the pleasure, the sick, unjustifiable enjoyment my mind seemed to sap from this specific “horror,” I started to feel guilty, inhuman. In my life, I interact with very few people, but I have known many, some of whom have been indescribably hurt and damaged by violence and intrusive thoughts. So, I understand how wrong it is that I thrive on the sensation borne of such a thing that would sicken the rest of the human population.

But in an awful world such as this, guilt does not negate pleasure. Anticipation of the next time I fall audience, actor, and theatre to my vice is not only a, but the over-arching theme of my life. In my thirty-six years of life, I have lived and loved boundlessly, but no longer. I suppose there was no reason nor need to so wholly abandon the world, yet I have. Perhaps I never liked any of it? Or maybe I just needed a change and am yet to begin the proactive search for something else one might expect from someone who intends to begin anew? I can’t entirely remember which is applicable, assuming either is. It is unimportant, nonetheless. If the former is the one, I have successfully peeled myself away from that displeasuring life. If the latter, I no longer have any intention to progress from the limbo between lives, in which I am presently situated. It is unimportant, nonetheless.

Between each occurrence of these lovely nightmarish flickers, I simply read. I read to pass time until the next rejuvenating, revitalizing flicker floats down into my eagerly awaiting mind and warms it with a powerful glow. This glow fades from flame to ember to ash, leaving me longing for the next time I can close my eyes, only to see them split open, blinding me once more until I reemerge into the reality of reading and ennui.

Nearly five years after my first taste of these experiences, three and a half or so since I ditched the real world for reading and dark-dream-dependence, I had my last—or, at least, most recent—engulfing into this sweet scene. In the time immediately preceding, it had occurred roughly three or four times a week. I was then tragically evaded by it for just under two months. During this period, I become more agitated and even erratic, but, at first, I bided my time, remaining patient. However, this agitation squirmed into an anxiousness that materialized largely in an obsessive picking-at of hairs on a specific part of my face. I picked and plucked, irritating the skin, all while hating the fact I was doing it. Each hair begged to be removed with a disconcerting and untranslatable grabbing of my attention, only silenced by escape from the growing flakiness. In some ways, this was a distraction, an alternative catharsis, allowing me to dwell in something other than the standard obsession. Eventually, my patience ran out. As the last grain of sand in my mental hourglass mind dropped from the upper chamber into its lower counterpart, I shattered.

In unrestrained hysterics, I resolved to transform my recurring and vicious phantasmagorical vice into a singular real enactment: likely a performance of imperfect form, yet it was the only hope I had. Before involving blades, I found myself submitting to my trichotillomania. I picked my shaggy, unkempt, stubbled face close to bald, raw and inflamed, akin to a just-plucked pheasant. Having snapped the blades out of an unused shaving razor, I began. It barely hurt, and the sensation was euphoric. Remarkably, as in my lost flickering fun, the act was also devoid of blood, an hematological miracle I welcomed with a newly deformed grin. From each run of a razor through my cheek or nose or forehead, a rush of warmth spiraled through my twisting body and along into any bodily cavity it could reach, instilling an immeasurable physical pleasure. Following a few beautiful minutes, and once it seemed no more disfigurement could feasibly take place (my lips hanging off my grin, my cheeks in gaping display of my yellowed molars, the flares of my nostrils unrecognizable), progression was necessary. Upon gathering composure, the splitting of my eyes saw me jittering with excitement. I did them at once, in two opposing movements pulling away from the bridge of my nose. My sight was lost; or rather, it was thrown away, it was my choice to dispel it and therefore “lost” hardly applies. I had rid myself of the sights of this sickening place and artfully gashed face of mine. I bathed in the glorious sensation my reproduction had afforded me for probably close to twenty minutes, though I wasn’t exactly in a state to count the seconds as they trickled by.

Time came to go one step further than the flickering I had known so well. I ripped myself away from the mirror that had been the reflective canvas of my work until I rendered observation impossible and thrusted myself out of my basement flat as quickly as I could in my visually impaired state. As I struggled along the blank roads and pavements, I waved my arms about in front of me to help identify obstructions so as not to collide with them. People must’ve been stunned into a frozen horror by my appearance. I could hear strangers shuffling around me, yet no one approached as one usually would to someone so gravely “hurt” as myself; they didn’t and therefore I can only figure they were understandably terrified. At the main road, I threw myself out in front of what sounded like a bus or another large vehicle, without much hesitation. In the milliseconds before this, I recall hearing a ghostly scream. I don’t think it was mine.

*

I just woke up in a hospital bed across from an irritatingly loud drunk, both of us wired up to some machines. The nurse told me that I had suffered a mild concussion, a fractured wrist, bruising upon my ribcage, and some cuts and scrapes along the left side of my body and face. She mentioned nothing of facial disfigurement or visual impairment and seemed confused when I asked of it. Honestly, I do not understand the situation. Perhaps I had . . . well, I don’t really know what. I’m lost, but really, all I can do is try again. 

*