Kathleen Glasgow

I mean, we spent so much time wasted back home, do you realize that? We were fucked up all the time.”

“I know. Some of it was fun, though.” I smile.

“Yeah, but sometimes you have to let stuff go if you want to move forward, you know?

But the fucked-up part is once you start self-harming, you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a girl, nobody will love that, and so all of us, every one, is screwed, inside and out.

I wasn’t scared. I’d just never seen a girl with skin like mine.

He said, “I just want it to be quiet.”

I cut because I can’t deal. It’s as simple as that. The world becomes an ocean, the ocean washes over me, the sound of water is deafening, the water drowns my heart, my panic becomes as large as planets. I need release, I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.
There, there.
Casper told us, “It’s counterintuitive, yes? That hurting yourself makes you feel better. That somehow you can rid yourself of pain by causing yourself pain.”

What I don’t write is: I’m so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed, just like my father.

Ambivalence is not a friend to art.”

I can never win with this body I live in.

—Belly, “Star”

remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth.

their accidental beauty. The last thing I thought I might see before I died on the cold