Extreme Body

An excerpt from a piece for my Writing Body class about extreme body situations.

I do it because it makes me feel strong. The first time I ever cut to the vein was more euphoric than any drug high. It was my right cephalic vein, the vein that runs down your bicep. I was a runner. I was lean and muscular and my veins like boiled broccoli had risen to the surface of my skin. It’s the middle of summer, middle of the day, on an open dirt road in the middle of nowhere no one cares about and I have a brand new razor blade in my hand.

First, it’s getting passed that obnoxious epidermis, obnoxious because none of its five layers contain blood vessels and therefore no blood can be drawn. I can get to the dermis in the second or third swipe, depending on the sharpness of the instrument. That day, it was the second. The uppermost layer of the dermis, the papillary region, is basically pesky connective tissue, which like the gristle of a steak, just gets in the way.

It’s the fourth cut and I’m onto the second dermis layer, the meat of the skin. As the blade begins to devastate this region, it severs sweat and sebaceous glands, hair roots, and most importantly, blood vessels. I begin to bleed. And by cut six, I’ve hit the nerve receptors. My body is thrown into a panic at the opening of the skin, the loss of blood, the agitating of the receptors. It screams at my brain to beg my hands to stop. But they won’t and it’s cut seven and I’ve reached the hypodermis, the layer just before muscle.

The razor is deeper than normal, the bottom half completely submerged into the incision. I begin to worry, but continue to cut. I can tell the razor is cutting a layer I have never before felt. It’s thinner, it moves. When I press, that large blue vein running down my bicep jumps slightly.

I poke at it a few more times, pressing the tip into the wound full of blood. It’s splashing over the sides like waves breaking the deck of a ship. It’s time to cut. I go much slower, slicing laterally. The blade breaks the thin connective tissue and smooth muscle protecting the vein. I pull back, removing the blade completely from the wound.

It’s like punching a hole in a garden hose and turning the water on. A jet of black crimson squirts from the cut. I shake my arm up and down at the shoulder, and more leaks from me. I put my blade back in, make one more slice. Like an underground spring, the water knocking loose and bubbling up from deep within the ground, pure and fresh and new. I again move my arm and discover I can manipulate the stream, shooting it up in an arch to strike the dusty road. The heat turns my blood red, but the stream is black. I’m sitting with my right elbow in my left hand, propped up on my knee, watching the black stream, occasionally pumping my shoulder to increase the flow.

I was worried as I watched the puddle fill up and overflow, worried as my head became light, wondering if my mind was making up the black dots behind my eyes. I did not stop it. And it flowed for about fifteen minutes when finally the blood pooling in my wound began to clot.

Within that month, I did it four more times in that exact same spot, keeping the wound fresh, discouraging the scab that yearned to close me up and protect me from the outside world. I had to learn to stop fighting against my body, to instead find a unity with my skin and blood and bones. But not then. Then, it was a game to push my body to extremes, running and lifting and cutting to increase the stream’s strength, to stretch it’s reach, to lengthen the amount of time it flowed. I also started getting colder faster, eating less, and tired sooner. In a feverous attempt to strengthen my body, I instead made it weaker.