Skin-written

I can­not con­trol my skin, so I etch on it for tem­por­ary relief. Scratch out the fever­ish, black-bloodied let­ters onto the milky white. I should get out more, or else fade into so much grey­ing and decay­ing and gone, finely dusted.

The nib bumps over the dry, flaky sur­face. Don’t scratch, don’t itch, don’t retch, don’t crash. Scritch and flitch. Clatch and platch. It’s all so much noise now, so much mean­ing­less fling­ing against the wall to see what sticks. Duck down fast, crouch low and hide behind your turned cheeks. Face the wall, because here comes another tor­rent of verbal abuse. You’re right, I don’t have an earthly. Not a fuck­ing earthly.

Scribble and scrape and scrawl and scratch. Again, again and more again. It’s too com­puls­ive to res­ist. No, I said. Don’t scratch. When I am done, you’ll be soothed. I prom­ise you that. I never lie about my lines of flow­ing ink, except per­haps when I resort to des­per­ately gab­bling and screech­ing in flag­rant cap­it­als like a thing, a thing possessed.

I know what hap­pens next, because I’ve nav­ig­ated this self­same route a thou­sand times before, in rolling storms and thun­der­ous out­breaks, whilst the moon above quietly appeals for calm and the res­tor­a­tion of tran­quil order. I know these dis­tant shores like the back of my hand. The beacon you raise to guide me looks so wel­com­ing, so reas­sur­ing. Keep burn­ing, don’t fail me now. There’s the prom­ise of har­bour, moor­ing and rest, drift­ing nowhere on lul­laby ripples. All that and more lies only a few hours jour­ney from this well-marked ship­ping lane.

Soon, very soon, I will smear myself in anti­sep­tic grease to calm the irrit­a­tion which seethes inside my entire nervous frame­work, yearn­ing to break forth in unsightly blem­ishes. Not yet, though. Not yet. Just one more curve, one more stem, one more letter.

This pen is fast run­ning dry, just as I am. It ran dry and ran aground, broken on the rocks; a beached ves­sel tak­ing on water, yet parched for liquid susten­ance and gasp­ing for the merest drop of mois­ture with every breath of its iron lungs. Trust me, if I press here and here and there and there, as if this hand and wrist and fist clenched tight were a newly ripped sheet of bliss­ful white and feint, I’m sure that I will loc­ate a friendly life­line. If I write on this empty page, it might prove some­thing. I’m not sure what, since I am not think­ing at all rationally.

Can you feel my fin­gers? Can you feel me grasp­ing? Are you hold­ing? Hold, hold and thrice hold. Grip on for dear life. All you’ll feel is a moment­ary sting­ing, then the faintest drop of that black blood seep­ing, seep­ing, seep­ing and solid­i­fy­ing. There there, that didn’t hurt a bit, did it?