Feeling: Brief
Listening to: Morrissey - The More You Ignore Me
Reading/Watching: Sword Maker

The theme for this month's Ampersand Project is "knives."

Mine will be brief.

I don't like knives. At all. I could get all flowery and write something poetic about the knives of hatred or knives of loneliness, blah-de-blah. But I don't like them.

I don't like them because when I was fourteen I took a steak knife to my wrist, and it hurt so badly I didn't have the courage to do the other one, and I stood there in the kitchen, teeth clenched, left hand fisted around the ragged cut (little more than a vicious scrape, the knife was so dull), trying so so hard not to scream as my brain registered You are a fucking idiot and why make one hand go all Norman Bates on the other and OW this hurts, because my dad was in the living room, watching TV, and while I'd been willing to let him find my bloodless corpse, I was too embarrassed to let him see me foolish and bleeding all over the linoleum.

Paper towel for the floor, three bandaids for the cut, and it was erased. I wore those wide hammered metal bracelets for a few days, the ones Dad brought back from a business trip to Italy or Argentina or wherever, until the scabs healed. I've taken to wearing a watch every day since then, and it's neatly concealed beneath. I get paranoid whenever I forget to wear it, even though Harry once looked closely at my right wrist and promised, with a kiss to my skin, that he couldn't see anything there. As if my own flesh wished to forget as much as the rest of me did. But I still see it.

I used to instinctively grab my right wrist whenever someone was waving a knife around. Guy friends would be playing, making jokes, checking out those ornamental daggers in specialty shops, and it took me a long time to train myself not to do it, because all it did was draw attention, and the unbearable question, "Are you okay?"

It was the first and last time I ever attempted it. I never was one for visible scars. So I don't like knives.

End of story.

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