Nature’s Cut

Broken Flowers: Nature’s Cut

I could still hear the cheap radio broadcasting from the kitchen: “...climate crisis news again today: experts confirm an increase of 2 degrees in average global temperature by mid-century is now inevitable. As of yesterday at the Global Climate Conference, the world powers failed once again to reach an agreement to prevent an even further increase… In related news, the two massive off-season wildfires raging in the state have now merged and directly threaten more than 6,500 residents, evacuations are underway ....” 

*-*

I was naked under the cold light of my bathroom, my bony back tucked into the corner between the wall and the bathtub, my legs slightly opened in front of me. My eyes were devoid of any expression, fixated on the cracks in the wall facing me. I was hesitant to look up, afraid to catch a glimpse of the ghost in the mirror.

I probably looked like a washed-up crack whore in a public bathroom, with my tall and thin frame and my tits hanging on my chest. My weathered hands and fingers had not been anywhere near a manicure for many months. I felt just as desperate inside as I must have looked pathetic on the outside. I felt numb in a bad way, hollow, devoid of any hope. 

I held the razor blade between my index finger and my thumb, on my left hand. My hand was trembling, part of me was terrified of it, my familiar demon, my very old friend. But the rest of me was craving it, I knew it would fix my emptiness, it would fill me with something, a sharp pain that would radiate through my body like an electroshock. 

I would not be hollow anymore, for a short while. Later of course, it would return even worse, but at this moment it didn't matter. I knew the path from there was only downwards, but right now I needed it so bad, more than anything I had needed in the last eleven years. 

My hand was moving closer to my inner thigh, I instinctively spread my legs further. The ritual was burned into my brain. Why was it so easy to go down that path? It felt like sliding down the side of a pit. It was too late now, I was too close to the bottom, I had long lost the necessary strength to dig my heels in, stop the fall and climb back up. 

I pressed on my thigh with my right hand so the skin would be taut and smooth. Then, my left hand slowly pushed on the blade and sank the sharp metallic edge into my flesh, where old scars had been surgically erased a long time ago. Then slowly pulling down, I let it slice through my epiderm. Hypnotized, I watched  the blood pearling in the blade’s path, and starting a slow descent tracing a bright scarlett line on my leg. 

It took a moment for my brain to register the signal from my wound, but then it exploded like a thousand needles had pierced my skin and high voltage was coursing through my body. I felt alive again, immediately. The emptiness was gone, and life came back. Like with  Frankenstein’s monster, a dead soul was re-born. The pain was so sharp and so real that it forced me to exist in the moment, right there right now instead of being the distant blur of a fading memory, as I was just a minute ago. It felt so good to suffer, to feel.

But also just like that, the long fight was lost. The last eleven years of my life, my “sober” years, vanished from existence. All the levees, the guardrails, the therapies, the support groups, it all blew into pieces. It felt horribly familiar and comfortable. All the people who had helped me, invested in me, trusted me, I was spitting in their face right now, defiant. That misplaced pride was also an old acquaintance. Being the bad girl, the asshole who was just special this way and fuck you for even trying to suggest I needed help! It felt so comfortable again. The real me was back, feeling electrified while my heart and my conscience were descending into the darkness, sinking ever lower.

If the sharp pain was the blast of the detonation, immediately after came the burning fire, slowly spreading throughout my body. I felt a heat wave creeping between my legs, and I remembered the perverted arousal that always came with my ritual. I lifted my hand and went for a second cut, right next to the first, and again, and again, as more blood was sliding down my thigh and dripping on the white tiles. After four cuts, my left hand dropped the bloody blade on the floor, and then moved on to softly caress up and down the lips between my legs. I was soaking wet, oozing on the floor, and a legendary fire was burning in my crotch. 

Applying small pulses on my button, probing my drenched entrance, while my right hand would apply pressure on my bleeding open wounds, both hands each in turn playing with the rhythm of pleasure and pain. My orgasm was building while I was sinking to the lowest of the lows. I came violently, my body shaking like an epileptic bleeding whore. I burst into tears, I was feeling all the emotions, the greatest pleasure and the most profound sadness. I knew deep down that had I really lost the battle, there would be no going back, and my eyes were crying all my distress. 

*-*

There had been signs, mind you, a long time coming. Signs I should have known but missed, or maybe just ignored because I knew this was how I deserved to end-up. It had started four years ago, with the record-breaking wildfires that blazed through the area. I had of course been well aware and educated on climate change. I was active in the community, going to rallies, and I knew how bad it would get. However that summer it was right in front of me, palpable, thick smoky air, the red suns and orange skies in the middle of day. 

But worse, as a field biologist, I had spent years in those pristine areas, surveying, observing, and studying. It was my piece of paradise, my escape, my joy. My heart and my soul were there. And that summer it all went up in smoke. In my bones, it felt like the beginning of the end. 

“You cannot be so emotionally invested,” they had told me at the University when I burst into tears in the middle of the day. “You have to put a distance between you and the field.” Fuck those assholes, who would sell their mothers for a private sector grant. The whores of humanity, pretending to have the moral high ground. I didn’t last long after that, called them a bunch of cunts and left, or got fired. I can't even remember and I don’t care. 

Most normal people had gone on with their lives, calling the fires a freakish natural disaster. But I knew it would come back every year, that this was the new normal and it would only get worse. And year after year, sign after sign, record heat after record heat, I became more and more depressed. Hypnotized by the news of natural disasters in the making, scouring the internet for signs of the apocalypse. 

Sure, there was also hope. They wrote that we would cut greenhouse gas emissions, that people cared, that humanity would stand up! All bullshit! None of the CEOs would ever give a cent of their prized gross margins to help save our world. And even if they wanted to they couldn’t.

The whole system was locked up in a deadly dog-eat-dog logic. If you showed weakness, gave up productivity for sustainability, you would get distanced by competitors, dumped by investors, chewed up and spit out. And those who claimed they were doing something and surviving, you could be damn sure it all was green washing or abuse of public funds. It was all fucked, and humanity would do nothing.

The last straw was the so-called “Green Haven” development project, a supposedly sustainable community close to nature, marketed for environment-conscious Silicon Valley remote-working type assholes. Except it was right in my secret place, where I had found maybe the last growth of the critically endangered Snowy Stickseed, “Hackelia Venusta”. 

I had decided to stand up and fight. I had swallowed my pride and gone back to my university contacts. I had organized demonstrations, sit-ins, even chained myself to a tree. All for nothing in the end, except seeing all over the internet my photograph in chains with my tits out, yelling at the reporters like a mad bitch! 

We went to court. But just a few days before the hearing, it was discovered that a *herd of wild pigs* had magically plowed through the flower growth, leaving none standing, roots and all. Never mind that nobody had ever seen wild-pigs in this area, and never mind there had been nothing edible for them in that spot. The judge had ruled, his disdain and ignorance on full display “No Snotty Stickseed, no reason to stop the construction!” 

Enraged, I had even attempted to punch the bastard, but even that I had missed and only earned myself a few nights at the county jail. What a fucking disaster.

*-*

I was at the lowest of the lows, and that’s when the need came back to me, like a pack of crows following my shadow. It would not leave me alone anymore. Growing in me, pushing me down. 

I had flashbacks of the severe clinical depression of my youth. My life as the weird girl at school, always an easy prey to the bullies. My very proper and socialite mother, who couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, but prayed every day for me. And my so-optimistic-he-was-blind dad, I could hear his “Don’t worry Julia, we’ll get through this my daughter.” He never had any clue about me, and I always wondered how we could be wired so differently. 

I remember how I felt isolated in the middle of my own family. How I grew lonelier at school and at home. How I didn’t want to talk to anybody anymore. How I gradually lost touch, until one day, my pristine body standing naked in front of my parent’s bathroom mirror, an exacto knife in my right hand, the only thing that made sense was to press it against my skin and to slowly draw a red line. It was amazing, like my starved soul was getting CPR.

And already back then, I had moved my hand between my legs and lost myself in a twisted arousal as I applied the blade again and again. Oh my god how excruciating and wonderful it had felt. The pleasure of a throbbing wet pussy saturated with teenage hormones, and the bleeding pain on my skin, together overwhelmed my senses. Later when it faded, I sank ever lower in the depression. And the need came back, ever more overwhelming and intense.

It had been going on for three months when my mum discovered my addiction. She had cried, feeling hurt and angry. She had yelled at me that I was sick inside. We went through hordes of counselors at her church and with school. At best they were useless, and the worst of the lot, well I could see their eyes light-up and and their pants bulge when I was describing what I did to myself. They did not help me. 

But I had my youth and still had a sliver of hope. I struck gold when I fell in love with nature, its beauty and wonder. The amazing complexity and the perfect simplicity of it all. This love wiped out the darkness and lifted me to the light. I got better, forgot about the blade and moved on with my life. 

However now, it was all fucked and for good. I was not eighteen anymore, I was a forty-three years old woman bleeding in her tiny bathroom, and nature was dying. The force it took to recover back then, I simply didn’t have it in me anymore. So I took all my hurt, muted by my recent orgasm and the bleeding cuts on my thigh, and I went to bed, leaving a trail of red-dots behind me and staining my sheets. I couldn’t give the slightest shit.

*-*

My pain and pleasure fix in the bathroom that day carried me for a week. And then I got worse as I knew I would. I sank lower, I became more hollow. And I needed more pain to keep myself alive. The cycle continued, it felt overwhelming, until I knew something had truly broken in me. 

In the old days there always had been some struggle between the light and the dark. But now I felt nothing, like I had already descended into some lifeless hell. There would be nothing ever pulling me back to sanity, I was sure of it. There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

I lasted a month in that state, I could have desiccated like a plant without water, remained a hollow shell until I snapped and broke. I chose to feel alive one more time, I just knew there was no coming back, from the intensity of the shock it would take.

I took a shower, changed the bandages on my legs and arms, covering the scars in various tones of red from barely healed to scabbed. I stopped by the medical supply store, I knew the stone-head cashier would not ask any questions. Then I drove to “Green Haven”. I had been back there once before, in an exercise of self-pity, to see what devastation had resulted from my failures. Now it was time that I paid the price, in blood and in tears. 

I found exactly the place I was looking for, it was a garage for a unit yet to be sold, close to the area where the “Showy Stickseed” once grew. I managed to pick the lock, a useful skill remaining from my activist days, lifted the door, sneaked in and closed it back behind me. I was alone in the graveyard of my downfall. I took my clothes off and sat my back in a corner, opened my shopping bag,  and took the scalpel out.

I traced the first line just above my belly button, for about an inch, on my flat stomach. I followed with my eyes the blood dripping from the cut,  and pooling into my navel. It hurt, but I felt as lifeless as ever, just a ghost in pain. My dried up soul would need more… much more pain. I cut five lines around my belly button, for the five petals of the Stickseed, each time the pain increased. But it just hurt! Why did it just hurt! Was I already too late? Was I already just a lifeless rag, with not even one last spark in me?

I moved down, and started to draw vertical lines on my shaved mons. It hurt! But it was not enough, I needed more intensity, I needed the blade to truly fuck my flesh. With the scalpel, I cut a piece of my belt, rolled it on its length  and shoved it between my jaws, something to bite on for the pain. I positioned the blade at the top of my first pubis cut, and I sank it further into my skin, slicing the epiderm open where before I just had a superficial scratch. 

My whole body started shaking, and more blood dripped down seeping into the creases of my sex. Finally, behind the agonizing pain, I felt a warm sensation between my legs. It was small compared to the pain, but I could feel it nonetheless, it was real. A last wave of pleasure was within my reach. 

I moved my left hand down over my sex and started to caress between my lips, my fingers smudged in red. With the scalpel I traced the other cuts over my pussy, marking more seriously my skin. Every time, I instinctively pushed my knees open and thrust my hips forward, just as if I wanted to get fucked by the blade.

I could start to feel a dim light inside my dead soul, and I could feel something between my legs, a beginning… Meanwhile my body started to tremble from the pain…

I moved up to my breasts, and repeated the flower pattern. Starting with the right tit, I held it firmly with my left hand and I pressed the scalpel with the right,  just above the areola and pushed up. Oh my god did it hurt! But I needed it so bad! I mustered the courage to press enough on the blade, and see it ever so slightly dig into the flesh. Blood was pearling a bit more profusely at each cut. 

When my left breast was done, it looked like a crying red flower, and below, crimson war paint was slowly dripping onto my belly. My head felt warm and cold in turns, both light as a feather and too heavy for me to carry. The room started warping and dancing in front of me. And the pain, the pain was intense. I could not stand it much longer. But I was still hollow, the fire was just a pale reflection. How? I had my other breast to work on still, maybe if I could go for a little longer, maybe if I could hurt myself more… 

Both my hands were now shaking and stained in blood, and it took all the focus in the world to keep them steady enough to proceed. But I did it, I found it in me. I started again, I pushed the blade deeper again, it was like opening my body enveloppe to let the emptiness out. My hands were convulsing almost. It hurt so much…  it was unbearable, excruciating. But the life was burning in me now, so intense, I could feel it radiating through my skin, consuming my insides.

My left hand traveled one last time between my burning hot lips, sliding  down in a mix of ooze and blood. Even through the overwhelming pain I felt the pleasure, in its purest form. I moved my fingers down my lips, pushed them deep inside of me, enjoying one last time that lovely pressure inside of me… 

At the same time I pressed the tip of the scalpel just below my ear. I pushed and traced a line around my neck as my other hand moved up and rubbed slowly against my button. I came… What was left of my mind blew up into fireworks… I felt at peace… and I dreamed that my ghost would curse the humans away from this place… and I dreamed that my blood would seep through the concrete and water the last seed of the “Hackelia Venusta”, and I was full of hope when the light and the room faded away and the darkness took everything away…