Live Free

Beige walls stared back at me. White furniture surrounded the room, just begging for dirt or some kind of sign of wear. I rubbed sweaty palms against my knees. My eyes traveled around the room. A single window, a dark wooden desk, shelves of books, and several framed documents. I pulled my feet up to my chest, the green sweater riding up my thighs.

“How do you feel today, Reese?” Ms. Justine asked.

How was I supposed to feel? Empty. Closed. Locked up. In pain. That was what I felt. But that wasn’t accepted. Ms. Justine wanted to think I was getting better; she wanted to feel like she was making a difference.

Dark hair pushed back across my shoulder. Was I better? No, I wasn’t. The large clock in Ms. Justine’s office tolled twelve and I stood from the unnaturally white couch.

“I must go take my medicine now.” I said in a detached voice, and meandered out of the room, closing the door softly behind me.

There was already a line in the common area. The patients spoke in tense whispers as they waited for the nurses to dole out their medication. That was all we were here. Patients with problems, who needed medication to be normal. But we would never be what they thought of as normal. We were the freaks of society; the ones who needed to be locked away in such an institution. These places that were meant to help us.

I stood in line. At the front I was handed two small plastic cups. One holding water and the other two small anti-depressants. I swallowed them, knowing that if I didn’t they would find a way to make me. I removed myself from the line, just barely glancing back through the glass of the small office and noticing a shimmer.

My heart began racing. Scissors. My eyes slid shut, I could see the metal sliding into my skin, watch the blood drip down into whatever drain I had decided to use that day. My fingers scrunched up in the green sweater I wore, my nails itching to dig into my arms even though they were merely stubs.

“You saw them too.”

My eyes opened slowly, a small redhead stood by my side, staring through the glass of the office. The gleam of the scissors was gone but the need to push something into my skin was not. I needed the control, the power over myself.

“Could you miss them?” I asked.

“When you’re one of us? I doubt it.”

How she said that, ‘one of us’, I wasn’t sure what to think. Was I really a part of a group? Was I really a… a cutter? I couldn’t be. It couldn’t be true. They just didn’t understand. Nobody understood! My life was so planned out, so structured. I just needed something I could do to give me the feeling of power over my own world. I wasn’t a… cutter.

A sigh escaped my lips. It was never my idea to be a cutter. But somehow I had become addicted to the pain. It was an odd relief to see the blood, to know that they couldn’t control that one part of me. They couldn’t just store me in a box and pretend I was the perfect child. I

I nodded and she placed a hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t a pitying gesture, but one of understanding. Her nails were just stubs, like mine, her food pre-cut, and she was watched intently all day. On her arms were the raised bumps of scars, scars that were all too familiar on my own arms. And legs, and torso. They were everywhere. Little reminders that I didn’t have to be who I was.

I was an addict of pain. Even though I wanted to live free of it, I couldn’t. Whenever the structure returned, so did my cuts. When I cut, I could deal with going to Cambridge, I could become the CEO of my father’s company, I could keep up the charade. But I didn’t want to.

Maybe it was always my plan to be found out. Maybe somewhere deep inside me I had always wanted people to know. But I never wanted to be placed in a group. Once again put in a box. Only this time, I was in the box of cutters.