CW: self-harm.
Welcome to my destruction.
• • • •
My head. Let’s start with my hair, more specifically, follicle by follicle. Brown in color to match my eyes; curly like traps—I’m Black—see it now. My hair lies fluffy on my head, like a good wig for the wrong owner. Like something too precious for me to have.
My hair is my most admired feature. Friends twist it around their fingers like spaghetti around a fork. They praise my curls, how full they are, how they intersect each other’s spaces. But I don’t see the appeal.
My hair: It doesn’t suit me. It’s for a more desirable fellow, a less hateful person, a more rounded individual. It looks better broken up, split apart like open ends of skin, when I believe it doesn’t belong to me. When I can hold it up, torn and bloodied, and throw it to someone else in the invisible audience, like a bouquet thrown by a bride at a wedding.
I rip out the hair, clump by clump. I tear till there’s nothing left but wet strands lying on my itchy scalp. I think: That’s more realistic. That’s suited for me.
Sit back and relax.
I’m just getting started.
• • • •
In a way—
No.
This is an essay.
This is an essay on my body type, my blood type, my gender type. This is a story about a boy that crashes and tears himself apart. This is a story about a portal world made of broken glass, and how it can heal you. How it can liberate you.
Let me unburden myself. Let me divide myself into fragmentations. Let me show you my individual pieces before I’m truly gone.
• • • •
My face. Let’s move downwards slowly, give each feature its time. A camera in this world zooms in on every follicle, every insecurity. A crowd of people watch me behind a tinted screen and laugh. They laugh and laugh as I tear myself to shreds.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Whoever is watching, whoever is reading. Hello. I’ll give you a show. I’ll give you this essay. I’ll give you my liberation.
My face. Oh God, that face. Granted it looks good individually—camera, zoom in on each part, please—but it doesn’t come together. The furry eyebrows don’t match with baggy eyes. The thin lips don’t compliment a fat nose. The large ears stick out too much for my angled head; it doesn’t work. I can’t ever work.
My classmate once told me that I’d look better fairer, so I tried a bunch of bleaching creams, but they didn’t take. The bleaching creams burnt patches of my cheek, ruined my skin texture. Nothing could make me look better. I threw them out after a few tries, bottle in bin, and moved on to a better remedy.
Glass.
The portal world is full of shards. Glass explodes everywhere: It falls from the sky, it consumes the white space of this world. I pick a shard and dig up a fat pimple from my cheek. I move to my eyes next: Scoop them up with a blunt edge till they pop out from my face with a satisfying thud. Even as I watch myself through fallen eyes, looking at my too-whole body from a spot on the ground, I think: I need to do more to wreck myself. I’m playing it safe. I’m not taking risks.
In the distance, glass breaks again.
• • • •
I’m sure you’re wondering: How did I get to this portal? How did I find myself here? How did I build my fractured state of mind into the skin-shifting, glass-breaking, self-hating?
Simple.
I drank my headache.
It was after a shit day of school, where our math teacher gave us problems to solve, and I couldn’t get one right. It was after every student went to talk to their friends during break time and I went to the empty chapel to eat alone. I sat in the car on my way home, trying my hardest not to cry the pain away. I’ve always felt like there is a rock sitting on my head, desperately trying to break into my skull.
I got home, lay on my bed, and hoped for death. The headache felt like cancer; I could feel it between my eyes, clawing my face, all through my skin. It spread to every part of my being. I wanted the pain to go away so bad, and I wished I could just swallow it. Vanish it.
And the headache called to me. It whispered in my mind, drink, and so I drank it.
I drank my headache like sour milk, like trash juice, like stagnant gutter water on the side of Sapele Road. I drank it till all I could see was a world where all pain was transferable, where I could see my hurt.
I drank my headache and found a new reality.
Believe that.
I bend myself here, break myself here. I take apart my features, examine my curvatures, shatter my psyche, again and again—hammer on glass, car crash to glass—all here.
• • • •
My neck. It’s long and tapering, it’s pudgy and awkward, it doesn’t suit me. I looked at it once in the mirror when I was twelve and all I thought was wrong wrong wrong. Other boys my age were better looking due to puberty, deep-voiced and broad-shouldered and so confident, but all I had was a long neck. My neck connects my head to my lower body, keeps me upright, and I’ve always wanted it gone.
When I was thirteen, I tried to slice my neck with a kitchen knife while both of my parents were at work. It was a terrible way to die, but I needed an outlet, and I had a headache that I needed to go away so, so badly. Nobody around in my new school wanted to talk to me, and the knives were lying in the kitchen cabinet, so I took them. I picked up a butcher knife, and raised it to my neck as I said my last words.
I recorded all this on a video on my phone. I believed that witnessing my attempt would force me to go through with it, or would make me appreciate life. Instead, one of my neighbors saw me through their windows and came rushing to my doorstep. They called my parents, who came rushing home, and I lied that it was all a joke. I felt like a failure then. I’ve always been frail, sensitive, soft.
I tell myself I won’t fail now.
• • • •
My chest: It looks disproportional, almost lopsided, in the way it hangs off my body. One of my uncles once told me that I shouldn’t be so fat and he punched my breasts on his way out of the house. I spent the rest of the week raising up my shirt to see the damage of myself: Where my skin sighed and fat sagged down, where my nipples hung like branches off my body. I imagined tearing off my fat and stomach and all my intestines and hanging it up like a coat, as if to remove my ugliness. As if fat is ugliness. I imagined for a minute looking in the mirror and seeing the acceptable body that everyone adores, the acceptable mind that’s neurotypical, the acceptable son.
I imagined being beautiful.
My stomach: I have a bit of a gut, chest hair; curly, tangling. I have wilder hair on my chest than I do on my head, and I guess I like how free it moves, how open it is to growth, how uninterrupted it is. Most times I feel like I don’t deserve good parts of my body, because they feel so out of place on me. My stomach is always empty because I rarely put anything into it.
I used to be fatter than I currently am, but now I’m barely chubby. Everyone from my parents to my uncles praised me when I started getting smaller; they thought it was a conscious effort to reduce myself into something better, someone worthy. But I miss my fat. I miss my stomach. I miss the way it signaled being happy. I lost that weight through sadness and pain, schoolwork and headaches, and the only thing that anybody noticed was the number on the scale.
“Keep it up,” my mother told me, each time she weighed me, like I had won an award. I wanted to throw up at her lack of realization, but I also felt pride.
But nobody’s actions matter ultimately. It won’t fix anything. I slice a line through my belly.
This is about me.
• • • •
Let me just say: Self-love is just a word—not an action, not a thing. I think about it a lot, and it either doesn’t exist, or it has two meanings, two ideas, theories.
The first is that self-love is for pretty people. To be beautiful doesn’t mean to have one desired attribute. It doesn’t mean to have nice eyes or a warm smile or one of all that. It means to have a body that holds together, with each part that complements each other, that functions to be gorgeous. Or to be beautiful is to be loved and to be desired.
And I don’t have that.
The second definition of self-love is tolerating the body, growing comfortable with it, changing it based on what you need, and what is true.
And I don’t have that.
In a way, I don’t want anything better. I don’t want to change, because there’s no right for me. I look better in pieces, and I may never convince myself that I can be whole, even in some way, even in any way. I don’t have a solution, just that I don’t like me and I don’t deserve me.
I’m not happy, but I don’t know how I’ll get better.
• • • •
My tongue: I don’t like how it moves; I don’t like how wiggly and slimy it is, I don’t like how it gave me a lisp that my cousins teased me about during dinners on Christmas Sunday. I don’t like how it makes me sound: unmasculine, unattractive, unworthy. I don’t like how I’ve internalized male toxicity, how socialized I am to be insecure, but I’m still me. I tear my tongue right out of my throat. Pluck out my teeth from hanging gums. The hard enamel hits the ground like stone. The stone makes glass break again.
• • • •
I’ve tried self-therapy. I’ve tried pain—swallow, slash, bleed, scream. I’ve tried speaking out but all that is filled with is the silence of the things I don’t say. I don’t say, because I could never accurately use my mouth to describe what I feel, except to live it. Except to make it. Except to show it to you now.
The curvatures of my body—
• • • •
My nose: I don’t like how big it sits on my face, a rock covering a tiny ocean. I don’t like how I look in the mirror each day and see only a pimple I can pop. I smash that piece to crumbled bits. I flay the skin from my too-big cheeks. I pull out my ears to hollow stumps. All through the pain and shame and hurt of living, I tear and tear away.
• • • •
I’m insane, I’m irritating, I’m self-deprecating, I’m already of this—body against the breaking glass. Crowd watching me, wondering what I’ll do. Me wondering if I’ll stay in a nightmare place.
• • • •
I grab a piece of glass and drag it round my throat. I cut my skin till I can see the bone. Even the flaying is not enough. I’ve not gotten to the root of how I feel.
My body doesn’t show all the pain inside.
• • • •
My back: I have back acne, mosquito bites, a trail of my spine to where my butt lays, a scar from when I was five and I fell on a gutter path after trying to get away from the direction of a car.
My back: the one part of my body that is a collection of injuries. At age ten, I scratched my back when I crawled like a lizard to impress my friends. At age twelve, I injured my lower back when my mother was flogging me and the cane broke into my skin. My back is strange because it is the one part of my body that remains past the breaking—it is healed scar masking as skin. It keeps reforming, reattaching, existing into a piece of me. My back makes me think skin could be scars, as weaponry for where the world has hurt you, but I’ve always thought of skin as whole. I guess herein lies my problem: being whole, being everything, having a perfect state of mind, being desired, being liked, self-love.
• • • •
I want to finally do it.
What are you waiting for? Do it.
Break skin, break self, don’t put anything back together.
Let the camera zoom in on a corpse in the making.
• • • •
I feel them, the crowd observing me, but I can’t see them. Where are the others behind the screen? Where are you, you that’s been watching all this time? I need you to watch me end it. I need you to see the end of this, to see the resolution of everything I think is true.
Rejoice in my suffering. Be glad, insult me, shame me; I don’t care.
All I need you to be is present, one last time.
So let’s break the barrier.
I fix my skin whole, and it looks strange to be whole again, to have my body move together. I drink my headache once more, toxic white sludge into my throat. It comes out goopy, makes my eyes go hazy. The world around me becomes clay. I’m ready.
I blink twice and every glass breaks. The white world comes crashing like struck lightening, and a sky full of glass begins to rain. The floor floods and floods with shards, until the shards rise to become a wave of glass in the shape of a leviathan. The glass sweeps me in, and I welcome it. It’s like I’m crowd surfing on millions of knives, stabbed and scratched over, and then it drowns me.
I open my mouth, and my throat fills with fire. I become fragmentations of myself once again. I’m waiting for sweet release, for the world to end.
But the avalanche starts to still. It moves slower, and I close my eyes. When I manage to open them; the crowd is finally in front of me.
There are multiple versions of me in glass seats, watching me, and it’s overwhelming. It’s like the sun, it’s too big, it’s not right. They boo me. Everyone in the audience, every part of my psyche—despises me. They vomit at my sight, they tear out their eyes, they stare at me with crooked faces that are painted with judgement. Pain. They all want pain.
So, I give them a show.
I throw my feet out from under me with a snap, like I’m pulling off shoes after a bad day of school. I bite the skin from my arms, leaving it discarded on the floor. I pluck out my nails and throw it to the audience, and they all duck instead of reaching for them. I twist my head from my neck and roll it onto the floor, swing it like a bowling ball. Take out the stomach and string up the organs, wrap the intestines around the heart.
And it’s done. Every part, torn apart. Me, in pieces. Total, complete removal.
But the crowd still boos. They don’t care. They don’t care if I’m whole or broken. They just care that I’m here. Glass breaks again, and the crowd falls into pandemonium. Their hatred towards me becomes more hatred towards themselves—which is just more me to destroy. They scream and argue, reach for one another’s throats. It’s an audience of blood and a world of coming apart, and it unravels and destroys but the core is still not healed.
I am not okay, not in any way.
Then I hear footsteps. A slow walk. I can’t trace it, what with my eyes and ears thrown in different directions. I can barely listen. But I don’t need to.
Someone takes me. Takes my head, joins to neck, bone to bone, muscle to muscle. It’s being fixed, all features back in place, all smiles in one direction. Someone puts me back together.
And of course, it’s me that does it. It’s me in a bow tie and a suit, smiling, and even though I don’t want to—I like him.
His body works, he looks put together, so how is he me?
How are he and I the same?
How does he look like he deserves the world and I deserve nothing?
He holds up a mirror. Its glass doesn’t break. The glass around me has only been shattering, cracking, but I’ve never looked through it. Never peered through it, never gazed at my reflection.
And I seem okay.
“I’m going to need you take three deep breaths,” he says, smiling, patting me gently.
I want to spit in his face. I tell him to leave me alone, to find someone else to disturb. But he keeps staring at me.
“I’m here,” he replies. He doesn’t argue with me. “Three. Deep. Breaths,” he says again, patting my shoulders. I’m too tired to protest. One breath through my lungs in a body whole, and a sharp spike hits my chest and my ribs.
Two and my head still aches, but it’s fading, it’s fading, right from where it stays between my eyes.
Three and it’s like I’ve been drowning under a layer of ice all this time and I’m coming up through water and onto the land, and for the first time, breathing. Three and I’m crying. Three and I’m crying.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay.”
“You’re not real,” I say. “You’re never real.”
“Listen.” He continues, slow but with enough warmth to still me. “If everyone in the audience is real, then why wouldn’t I be real? I’m here. I love you.”
“That’s what you say now, but any moment again you’ll disappear and leave me to myself and I’m not you. I’ll mess myself up and I’ll do something horrible and I won’t be okay and I won’t be alright and—”
“I’m you. You may not believe it from anyone else, but it’s me. You know it is. I don’t hate you. I love you and I could never stop, and I just want you to be happy. And safe. Okay?”
“But I’m not you and you can’t make me and it doesn’t change the fact that everyone else might—”
“We can listen to every sound of everyone loving you, appreciating you, since you were born. We can listen to our favorite music—alternative R&B, rain falling outside. We can listen to every moment when your voice was okay, and you were okay, and you were so much more than a bunch of pieces. We may have fragments, but you are your center. And a center is whole. You can come out of here, whole. You may crash, but you will always be here to pull yourself out.”
And I don’t speak.
He says again. “This is not your world. This is a headache. There is nothing that can heal you here—nothing that can vanish. And you know this. So I need you to do this: I’m going to need you to throw this up. Don’t take it in, don’t press it down. Don’t try to make it something else, to hide it. Throw up the headache you drank. And never come back here again.”
And I don’t speak.
I just throw up all the waste I’ve been drinking. Rise it out of my throat. Bring it out to the floor. Toxic white sludge spills out, watery and slimy, filling this world like a sea.
Then I breathe.
I close my eyes. I pray for home, for a better life, for no more aches.
Nothing happens.
“So how do I get out?” I ask, but there’s no one. You’re gone, and I’m alone once more. The glass breaks, falling from the sky like fireworks, and in their edges, I see my answer.
There will always be a door.
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