How I Get Through

Sometimes, when I was a high school junior, I would do this at home after school. There was no one in the house till my mother got through at work and got home at eleven ten every night. I would lock the doors as soon as I got home. My Boston Bulldog, Ricky, having died the year before, I had no one to talk with. I had one friend in high school. I had one summer month friend. And a girl who visited her grandmother every summer. Her name was Celesta. I loved her.

I would go to the bathroom and take a hanging not quite full-length mirror to the living room by the electric heater built into the wall. This was where my dog Ricky slept on his blanket. I missed him so, it was an ache in my heart and is still to this day. I would lean the mirror against the easy chair in that corner. I would pull the drapes to in the sunroom that was my bedroom for a time.

I would take from the kitchen drawer, a butcher knife—with the tip broken off and the blade dull as could be. I would take the knife and stand before the mirror at an angle to me. I would take off my clothes a bit at a time. Making it last. I would have an erection. No one knew I existed, not really. I had a form and a substance in the mirror however. I would strip totally and kneel in front of the somewhat dusty mirror that had some small defects in it. I would look at myself from top to bottom and I would masturbate while looking at myself doing that. My eyes were sad. They were any other time too.

Then I would lie on my side facing the mirror, which I turned to face me lengthwise. I would cum. I would have the butcher knife in one hand while I masturbated with the other. I put the broken off tip to what I knew was my carotid artery and I would press it in as hard as I could. I would cum and fall asleep sometimes, holding the knife to my neck. I always woke startled. Afraid someone had come in. Afraid I had been asleep for hours. I only dozed though.

I did this fairly often. But stopped in my senior year. I have no idea why.

In my junior year at university, I started for the first time living away from home. In the dorm. My roommate who I had been to elementary school with was a very nice person. At night though I was scared. Could not sleep. I remembered one of the scarier "Twilight Zone" episodes, in which a woman's mirror double in a deserted late night train station besets her and leads her on a mad chase through insanity. Her life was finally subsumed by the double. As was that of the young man, Martin Milner, who had the same happen to him. The woman character was played by, I believe, Inger Stevens. Who later in life killed herself. She, as Rod Steiger said, "was not interested in this false dance of life." Though it might have been Ann Francis who played the role. In fact, I think it was.

I've no real idea why remembering that episode and pretending I was in that train station, alone, not even the ticket taker, gave me comfort, but it did, and I fell into sleep fairly quickly for a long time. The sleep was restful and uneventful. Later on I discovered I needed something more to help me sleep. One night, facing eternal insomnia, something in my brain created this: shadows in the station at my back. Shadows moving slowly toward me. I could hear their silence. It was most terrifying. Maybe the most terrifying thing I have ever heard.

And soon, I don't remember the chronology of this, but it eventually ended up with three or four men I had never seen before. They pulled me off the station bench and beat me mercilessly. I did not feel pain of it. I remember they beat my head over and again, slammed it on the wooden floor, hit my eyes and bloodied my nose—and I found all of this-restful-calming. I did not go into it with fear but with hunger, to stay there in that Twilight Zone train station and to never leave, and to have them beating me up for the rest of my days. Some time later, I was able to pull out of the beatings, but I took that train station in my dreams till as of this moment, and it still helps me fall asleep.

Later on, I took to cutting my arms some. Once I cut my wrists, the cowardly way, and a great deal of blood fell out. Finally I stopped that, though it had been restful, as I understand endorphins had been released at those times to make me feel better. It certainly did that, made me feel a whole pressure had lifted from me, though it descended on me again with alacrity. But I couldn't go through that embarrassment anymore. Alcohol and cleaning up the blood and all those Band-Aids and explanations I had to come up with when it was summer and I had to wear long sleeved shirts because of that.

I hope to die each night. I am in love. I dream of his absence. Of someone talking with him on the phone, but I can't talk to him and they won't tell me where he is, even though he is close. I had a friend betray me a decade ago. This is the same scenario. As is a current scenario that has just started, of a broken friendship that fills me with fury because of the stupid injustice of it.

Lately, as on another "Twilight Zone" starring Inger Stevens, this I remember for sure, as a woman on a cross-country driving trip. She sees this little man thumbing a ride everywhere she goes. She cannot lose him. It is impossible for him to have gotten ahead of her car so far when he was walking, even hitching other rides could not have put him that far ahead. She calls her mother because she is so rattled. A neighbor tells her her mother's daughter is dead. She knows now and goes back to the car and lets the hitchhiker, death, in with her.

I have momentary flashes sometimes during the night, before bed, sometimes in bed, sometimes when waking up, there is a man in the hall, angular and tall and excessively thin. He is looking downward at the floor. He is not made of shadows. Though he is shabby and wears poor clothes. He stands in the hallway with one hand resting where the temp control for the cooling/heating unit is. He waits. Sometimes I close my eyes and he goes away when I open them. Sometimes I have to close my eyes and open them twice. Lately, it's taken me four tries at this before he goes away.

Sometimes there is this menacing silence around him. Sometimes he says vague, menacing things, while he is not looking at me. I can't see the hallway from my bedroom. Of course death does not care about a little thing like that.

This is the way of how I have gotten through life.

We do what we have to, to keep the sun rising in the morning.