Beautiful Agony (A Tale Of Savage Love, Part I) (2 page)

I’d never been
able to stop hating her for that
, nor had
I ever forgiven her.  And my father
, during the uncomfortable, sterile, love-less weekends spent - not enjoying my time with him, as I should have been - but trying to please my new
,
acerbically beauti
ful, ice-bitch
of a step-mother
instead
;
hadn’t fared
much better in my affections
in the end
.

As a result of my dysfunctional family, I’d left home with their blessings
at only sixteen
.  And
ever since that day until the present one
, I
’d
spoke
n
to neither of them
ever
again. 
Today,
I suppose you could
simply say that I didn’t care anymore what good
or bad
befell them.

I
ronically,
the
lingering
ravages of their destructive affections
had
been
truly
been minimal in the
long run
.  In fact, it had been nothing more than a passing inconvenience c
ompared to what had
befallen me
ten
months
after I’d
set out on my own. 
That
terrible, terrible day and the
l
ong, unrelenting epoch of sorrow
that
had
followed
it
, was something
I thought about often, but spoke about
never
,
w
hich
initially had
suited me
just fine
.

I think at first, I
childishly
figured
that to
bury
it
was to somehow escape from it – you know, stow
ing
it away in my subconscious
as I’d done with all my previous pain, thereby eluding
the ramifications of
it
hopefully
until the day I died.  But the reality, I
eventually
found, was that
nobody
can escape their past
throughout the entire span of their current lifetime
. 
Nobody.  N
ot even me.

Only by the time I’d realized what a mistake I had made by trying to hide from my guilt and regret, the pain had already festered to the point that it was unilaterally toxic to my soul.  I tried to fix it.  God knows I tried for all I was worth.  Yet it was too goddamn late.  Whatever
I tried to do
, regardless of how many prayers of penance I said, how many doctors I went to see, or how many drugs I took; nobody and nothing could help me figure out a way
to rip
out
those
hoarded miseries
,
once and for all
.

At this point in my life,
twenty-nine
years old, successful, talented, wealthy and
alone
,
it had
become
branded into my
being
.  All that shit, all that self-hatred, all the shame
, and guilt and remorse, had
become
entrenched
so deeply
within
me that it
had turned into a literal
fount of regret; a river of tears that
burned and singed
my
already-cindered spirit
like
caustic
acid
.  I
n their wake, they left behind no healing, whatso
ever.  O
nly a belief that I was
worthless, less than human,
and that I, too, should’ve died long ago.

And t
he
memories
-
oh, Jesus, the memories -
they
had
eventually grown
into
something of
a mal
evolent
and thready-little
tumor.  Year after year it slowly wrapped and weaved
its
wicked
fingers through every single part of me. 
Sometimes
I believed it belonged there
.  Other times,
I wanted to
violent
ly
wrench it lose:  tear
its
malignant
grip from the marrow of my bones
and start
truly learning how to
live again
.  Only how?
  At this point in my life, I honestly didn’t even know any more.

So,
I
’d
more or less
resigned myself to the belief that
I’d be infected with this vile mala
dy forever
.  I
knew I
certainly didn’t deserve any better. 
Most days
, I didn’t even bother to seek out a breath of hope.

But then, out of the blue, something
happened to me to change all of that.
  And then, only then, my existence honestly started anew
.

T
hirteen
yea
rs after the brutal accident that had changed my
dreams
forever, I
finally
got
a glimmer
:  a
tiny window into something that I thought just
might
end up being my life’s eventual salvation
.  I
chanced upon it
one lonely night last week,
right after I’d
finished
cutting myself f
or the millionth time (
slicing my thin,
razor-sharp
box-cutter carefully into the pale, papery-thin
membranes of
my upper arm
,
over and over again
)
.

Just so you know, I always did that calming ritual
in places
where the skin was so clear
that
I could see
an
d avoid
the purple, pulsating
, snaking rivulets
of my veins.  I didn’t want to kill myself, after all.  I was just hoping
t
o bleed
some of
my
inner anguish
out
through the seeping
incisions
,
thereby releasing me from
its
power. 
And I also knew that I, who had been the only one to have walked away
entirely unscathed
from that
long-ago,
fatal
night
,
deserved
to carry scars of my own.  God ha
dn’t chosen to give them to me.  T
herefore
I would
.

To an outsider, an innocent bystander, an ignorant, oblivious observer, the entire thing
would
’ve
probably
seem
ed
masochistically
ridiculous.
Or else they’d see it as a sinister suicide attempt.
But in truth
, that quick
bite
of sharpened steel against
soft
flesh
(which by now, at this point in my life, was actually becoming associated with a
sweet
rush of pu
re, hedonistic pleasure),
was
the only way
I knew
of
to release some small iota of my
otherwise
deeply
-
imprisoned
pain
.

C
urrently
, I
h
ad row after row of thin, white
scars in various stages of healing, all across my upper thighs, inner
arms, and along the entire breadth
of my ribcage
.
  Some people, if they saw me naked and bare before them, would look at all of that and find it
disturbingly
ugly. 
But
I
saw
the resulting
symbolic inscriptions a
s a
n essential
physical
release – a solid
incarnation of my
ephemeral,
hidden
grief
. 
As
such, I found the pale
slivers
quite
entrancing
.

They were my tribute to those I had lost
;
t
hey were at once a reminder, an honor, an ackno
wledgement, and a penance.  And,
as long as I had
now
been doing it, I
no longer knew how I could
choose to (or
even
want to)
stop.

But then,
I’d seen the movie
.

A little over a week ago, I had
gotten drunk
, all
by myself
(what a cliché, right?), and I’
d watched a
risqué
little
film
called
Secretary
.  It was quite a few
years old,
probably an Indie production, and apparently wasn’t really even much on the radar anymore
. 
I’d certainly never
heard anyone
I
kno
w mention it
to me
, and so as it was, I’d happened upon it only by chance. 
Up until then,
I’d been just flipping randomly through the channels for an hour
or so
when
I’d landed on
it right during the opening credits.  Figuring
it was just another tired
, boring
movie,
I’
d
decided to go ahead and watch for a while anyway, primarily
because it featured James Spader
, who happened to be
one of my all-time favorite actors. 
Remarkably, however, as soon as it started, I’
d almost instantly been
riveted right
to my seat
.

It never really elaborated that much
about the reasons behind the central character
’
s need to hur
t herself;
why she committed her
cuttings in the first place. 
Seemed like, at least partially, it had something to do with the same kind of dysfunctional family dynamics that had once confounded me. 
Yet
although it didn’t create much of an underlying
premise
fo
r the girl’s serious problems,
it
certainly
did
give a
possible
answer.
 
A very titillating one, indeed. 
And
so,
after I
’d
watched it
from
front to back (not even willing to leave the story long enough to merely go to the bathroom)
, I
had
lain
awake all night, unable to clear it from my mind.

I was well aware that
i
t was only a movie.  I mean,
dammit, movies are
all
stupid, right?  And certainly not one movie on this planet has
ever truly held
any of the answers we seek in life.  But oh, Jesus - was it possible
that
there was some
facet
of
truth to it at all?  For it was well known that movies
were
, in small part,
a reflection
of the human condition. 
Otherwise
, where would writers get all their
ideas in the first place?

So
was it possible then?  Was it conceivable that
having someone else torture me
relentlessly both physically and emotionally,
giving me
a jolt of
pleasure and pain
intertwined
;
could
help to
make my own inner demons fade gloriously
into the background
?
  Like I’d said, the release I got from the cutting was both painful
and
savagely s
weet
.
  I
t
therefore
stood to reason that mixin
g pain with pleasure during sex
-
just might be my ticket out of purgatory.
  I’d certainly never tried anything like it before. 
Oddly enough
, the thought had never even
occurred
to me.