Cowardice

i have a habit of telling people exactly how I'm feeling whether they really want to know or not, and so when Marv asked me what was on my mind i told him the truth. I'm thinking abut killing myself. He said "oh yeah, but i mean you don't have the balls to actually do it right?" and he was right. i don't. if i had the ability to kill myself, i would have by now. 

for years now, i have been getting closer and closer. start cutting on the thigh, then slowly move my way up to wrist level. my arms are covered(ish) in tattoos now, but if you were to check my wrist, you would find two small oval scars. those are from the times when i put a razor blade to my wrist and cut deep enough to know i couldn't go through with it, but more than deep enough to know i really wanted to. even if i had slashed a wrist (horizontal for attention, long ways for results) i probably would have woken up in a hospital room.

i remember the first time my dad took me to the emergency room for self harm. the woman looked over all my cuts, asked me a few question, then took my dad and i to a special waiting room. clearly this was where they stuck the crazies while they talked to the nice young men in there clean white coats, and it was covered in graffiti. like somebody had spent a month here frantically scribbling whatever inane bullshit came to him. some of it made sense, some of it looked more like battle damage, and all of it unnerved me in a way i felt a kind of kinship with now. for those of you interested in waxing poetic, i suppose you could say i wear those walls on my skin now. Some of my scars make sense to me, some are simply just battle damage, and some of them i couldn't explain with a gun to my head. 

i think i was right all along. the only way to get some serious help is to do something undeniable. a few scratches on your arm isn't enough to hold anyone's attention now a days. what was once a serious problem to my friends and family has basically become just the way things are.

that's my son, Eric, and he cuts himself. we tried to get him to stop, we failed, so now we just leave him Red Deer with the rest of the peanut gallery. yeah he is cutting himself, but hey if we stop talking about it its almost like we have had a normal kid this whole time. we care when we have the time to care, but he's an adult now so he should be able to deal it himself. unless he's a totally unredeemable fruitcake like his mom, in that case we will move him to a smaller zoo where less people can give him a hard time. 

any problem can be solved if you throw enough cash at it. we can get more doctors, more therapists, more steaks to hang around his neck, a new house in a new town, whatever it takes to prevent shame from ever befalling the Nielsen. Rewrite the history books, tear down the old schools and build shiny plastic new ones. 

hell even kids are replaceable. children are like monkeys, almost human but not quite human enough to make us feel bad when we kill a few or stick some in a cage