to the core | Ryland, the past, suicidal ideation, suicide, gender dysphoria, derealization, self-harm (cutting), chopped off finger unfortunately

☆

THEN,

1990

RYLAND DOESN'T know when she starts getting the idea, or when she decides to act on it. It may as well have been nestled somewhere between her heart and her breastbone her whole life, dormant, until her despondence finally got it to slip free. Like her heart has stopped beating, and there is no pressure to keep it in place.

It's not so much an idea as a truth, then it becomes a fantasy, and imagining it begins to make her feel light and whole. And she goes back to it at night in her room, thinking and deciding. Her decisions do not become real plans until later, but she has a morbid and distinct kind of fun, one born of not a self-destructing predisposition but a feeling of freedom. And probably release. She doesn't know what words describe it, or if it's bad or not. Her heart tell her it's not bad.

So it sits there in the palm of her hand like the stone of a fruit, and she holds it so tightly it sticks.

☆

Today, she is building a shelf, the sides have spikes on them. She likes woodshop. Everything has a place, it's satisfying in routes of measuring (twice), chopping (once), painting, sanding, gloss. She has sketched in pencil small flowers and stars along the outside of the wood, so that she can carve them in later.

She likes the teacher, too. He is middle-aged, he complains about the kids nowadays. They are so flashy, they don't know what he's seen, he doesn't know what will happen when they run the country, they come into school looking like freaks, they won't stop singing annoying pop tunes. Ry likes his complete lack of inhibition, the way he can mouth off and still seem approachable. He is not always bitter: he jokes, he teases and apologizes sometimes. He is Polish, he does not know the language but when she says she misses this, and she does not understand why that is different, he knows what she means by instinct.

He does not tease Ry because she is not flashy, she is quiet and careful, she does not see the sense in her peers' obsessions and flings, either. When he talks to her he finds her funny, about as much dry humor she can fit into a sentence or three. She trusts him enough to say what she means, not what she thinks he wants to hear. He lets her borrow the good tools he keeps away from the kids who are liabilities and lawsuits waiting to happen, sometimes lets her take them home to work on her projects in the backyard.

She is using the sharp saw with the good handle when it happens, and she doesn't understand what everyone's yelling about at first.

The kid who's always excited to use the power drill even stops his incessant buzzing to look at what everyone's staring at.

A girl screams almost before it happens, the instant it does. She must've been watching. There's blood everywhere, Ry can't imagine how she blinked and suddenly it was pooling on the table and dripping on the floor. For an instant her brain rationalizes it as her nights alone in her bathroom, but she remembers she's in school and the only thing she could've possibly cut herself with is the flat heavy blade of the saw, which she's pulled away from, uncurled her right hand from the handle to cup her left. Her palm is instantly warm with blood, but, still dazed, she can only imagine she's cut into it at an angle or something, because she feels a lack of pressure, her fist is closed but there's something numb about it.

"Aw, fuck! Dude..."

"Ew, ohmyGod!"

"Get Mr. L, someone--"

"Dude, sick!"

"What happened!?"

Every sound comes to her too fast, like lines of gunfire, and just as quickly it's lost to the thrumming of her pulse hot in her ears. Mr. Letewicz is reaching for her arm but she realizes her whole arm feels tender, and she doesn't want to move her hand.

"No," she says, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"It's alright, I just need to see, you need a doctor."

"I'm sorry."

He insists, "You need to go to the hospital, let me see."

"Uhh..." When she pulls it away, her right hand looks as though she's cut her wrist. Only then (she can barely feel it for the shock glittering in her bloodstream) does she see the way the tip of her left pinkie finger bends, just underneath the first knuckle, the skin and flesh completely severed. She can see the astoundingly white bone, glistening in the dim light. It does not look mangled or distorted, in fact it's very neat.

"She cut her goddamn finger off!" someone yells.

"Man, that's fuckin' nasty," says Drill Kid, laughing, until someone tells him to shut the hell up.

☆

They couldn't reattach the rest of the finger, so they ground down the bone to cover the wound. The stitches are swollen and uncomfortable. She thinks pani Szmytka will tell her just how foolish she was, that she will be angry, but the woman only, quietly, takes care of her.

They sit at the kitchen table in the żółty soft light from the overhead lamp, the rain pattering along the pipes and the windows like a record after the last track. Ryland doesn't complain, nor does she apologize again, but she hesitates when pani Szmytka reaches for her hand. She hates it, skittish as a cat around water. She has never liked another person on her, too close, breath and saliva and thoughts. Neither does she feel her body is her own, she is a brain--her fingers and mouth and throat are not controlled by it but merely its products. It's easy to convince herself that she can only exist in her mind, and she can there make herself look however she wants. When another person touches her she realizes it's a mistake, a lie, and she catches herself in it every time.

The woman eases her finger (or what's left of it) from the splint and undoes the bandage. The bowl of saline between them smells warm.

"Czy jest za gorąco?"

Ry shakes her head, though she gives a tiny smart at the temperature. When she flexes her hand it aches, she tries not to move it because the wound stings at the edges and throbs inwardly most of the time. That, and she's not taking the painkillers. At first its hot hot hot against the sensitive damaged nerves. It's really just warm, but it feels worse. She tries to move, to make it better. Eventually it resorts to equilibrium.

She hates staring at the surface of the table, the bowl, her hand, her threaded bracelets, the chipped brown polish on her four nails. The pain crawls through her bones and itches at her heart.

☆

She can't take woodshop anymore, so with her free time Ryland wanders the halls. She takes to sitting in the tops of the bleachers in the gym, watching the classes. No-one sees her up in her cramped, dusty grey space. Sometimes she wishes she could stay there forever, mindless and nameless. She wouldn't mind listening to the world change and move from up there, forever.

But when she watches everyone else, she starts to sense that there's something present in the rest of them that is totally absent in herself, and only when she can see it does she feel the empty space in her. Set back in her spine, up the vertebrae, coiled bunch of fog in her head. Most of the boys in the middle of the room, shooting baskets. There's a solid freedom in the curves of their ankles bracing large-sneakered feet on the ground. They work against the tile, and with the scuffs of many previous boys on it. The way they take, use, and discard in an instant, and the way they yell to each other without abandon, like animals in a field, playing to simulate a hunt, but knowledgeable enough to see where it doesn't matter. All the space before that, in which their game does matter, belongs to them. They do not ask before they take.

The girls, most of them on the other side of the room, seem more varied to Rylan, but she still doesn't feel like any of them. They chew gum and pace the floor. A few with ponytails kick a soccer ball between the four of them. They exist within themselves, they talk like they're being interviewed, even the friends who are practically blood talk like that. Rylan wonders what they mean when they talk. Is any of it true, or is a comment a placeholder for something else? Something kind? mean? sexual? Or is it just some kind of bonding ritual?

Nawet kiedy ona mówi po polsku, she doesn't understand people. When she was a child, the girls at school would pretend to get married to the boys, or to an invisible imaginary groom. They'd trade hair ribbons and bracelets, to grow up quick and be like their mothers, aunts, or favorite movie stars. Ryland had thought for a long time that her classmates felt as she did in those instances: that they were acting, playing dress-up. She had never experienced a shred of reality in the midst of those games. Then she realized everyone else was playing along out of a sense of belonging, as though predicting their futures--the activities had never been fun for her, because she could never picture a reality where her mind and body were in those situations, even within her imagination, picturing herself grown-up, she could not see a vision of flowers and nice beautiful clothes and sticky makeup.

The realization of her intense disconnect bothered her immensely in the moment, but the pain has faded and she has moved on to other things. She still cannot undertake what this means for her individually. The more she scrutinizes her peers, the less any one of them seems like a breathing, living thing. Every action is a slight against herself. The light from overhead crashes and hums with burning life, tactile crunches. All she can see is what she is not, until her lungs are heavily sick, and she starts to get dizzy. Her whole hand throbs, the air tastes dull and hard. The squeak of sneakers on polished wood floor is an onslaught of knives.

After school, she walks the long way home past the cemetery. The river alongside it is stuck with fishermen. They stand in the water, or on the clusters of rocks, or on the small patches of dirty banks. She likes to wonder about them: did their fathers show them this vulnerable, intimate masculinity? or did they do it themselves? do any of them know, or like, each other? She'd like more input, but they rarely talk to each other, or to the fish. They just stand, staring into the rhythmic flush of the stream. She would one day like to copy them.

When she gets home, the house is empty. Her key clicks in the lock like the knocking together of branches in the trees. The carpeted stairs, the kitchen dripping at the back of the house. To her right, the door to her room. She has taped nothing on it, no signage or collage of magazine clippings, like kids do in films and novels. On the inside her bed remains unmade, her books open on the desk, Christmas lights drooping and tangled in the curtains, TV remote hidden under tossed-aside sweatshirts. She dodges these mini bombshells on the floor and opens the drawer next to her bed. She makes sure the bag is still there, then shoves aside socks and underwear to reach the box nestled behind it. She leaves that on the bed, then digs her hand all the way to the back, in the far corner, where balled up is a pair of men's underwear.

Once, bored of some gathering at kościół or another, she dug around in the bags of donated clothes. One was full of a young lady's clothes: cropped shirts and tiny shorts, skinny jeans and leggings and zippered sweatshirts. In that bag she had found one outlier: a pair of fitted elastic bright yellow underwear, belonging once to some boy who, she assumed, had forgotten them in a pile of clothes on his way out a bedroom window around three in the morning. She was suddenly thrown into indecision. Equal parts fascinated and repelled, she had sniffed them, and, smelling neither sex nor penis (she did not know what the former smelled like, let alone the latter), shoved them into her pocket. Later she cleaned them in the sink and buried them in a towel under her bed. She worries she'll never have the courage to wear them. Who would know, or care?

Setting them next to the box, she awkwardly pulls down her pants, with more or less one right hand, her left braced on the bed when she kicks them off first, then her underwear. She trades them for the boxers and leaves her crumpled jeans on the floor.

She sighs and looks around. The world feels wrong, like every time she blinks she misses a burst of staccato magic, but with each flare the surroundings grows dimmer, worse, and more haunted and grainy.

She cannot stop herself from drowning in the torrent of rot, perceived general degradation. But she can make it a little less rapid, less charged with movement.

She locks herself in the bathroom and studies herself in the mirror, which is a softer and more challenging experience than her reviews in the school gym. The waves of her hair are flattened by her hat so that the effect stays even when she takes it off. She always wears tee shirts which more or less fit her, but their graphics make them look immature. Pani Szmytka says she should wear a nice shirt once in a while, so that boys will know what they're missing. She says it like a compliment, but it's not. Ry stands to the side and tugs at her shirt, a knock-off for a band she likes, mostly the only band she likes. Her hair curls against her neck.

The boxers fit her surprisingly well. She has to pull them up her hips. The effect is simultaneously disappointing and enthralling: she can see the places where the garnment was not made for her, and she knows in her heart she must fit the clothes, not the other way around; still, it makes her feel better than a shirt that shows her bra.

She sits in the dry bathtub and eases the lid off the box on the floor, trying not to spill anything. It's full of stolen razors and craft blades she takes from the hardware store, where she can slip in and out and no-one ever notices. She pinches one craft blade between her fingers and inspects the outside of her calf. The skin there is untouched, unmarked yet. She stares at the glinting bit of metal against her fingertips and white grout and yellow tile. Fuck, she thinks. Almost. Not yet.

She curls over her bent knee, the blade so sharp it feels almost soft, a dull sting, a tongue of velvet. As each new slash fills with blood she breathes a bit easier. The sick dullness caught in her lungs begins to dissipate. She goes on for longer than she means to, a pattern in the delicate white open wounds gradually dripping against the smooth floor of the tub. Stopping the bleeding grows tedious after a while, she gets bored watching it. She waits until it grows thick, then wipes it away in clumps.

When the static fades and her head clears, she straightens her leg and focuses on the tender pain of moving instead. Even the wind seems to slow down, the water in the pipes, the fish in the river.

☆

THEN,

1993

IF I hadn' called y', would you've called me?" she asks that night a week after New Year's Day.

"Sometime," Ry answers. She sits on the floor staring up at the waterfall of Tinù's golden hair over the side of the bed. To her it looks mystical. The room smells thickly of pot, and she can't feel anything anymore.

"Sometime," Tinuccia repeats. She blows a haze of bluish smoke to the ceiling. "Knowing you, it'd take forever."

"What's that supposeda mean?" They flip through the hardcover book they've gifted Tinù, which  they have already read. The Virgin Suicides. "I'm pretty...on time."

"Yeah, but, like, there's no date to give someone a call by. You just gotta feel it. An' you wouldn' feel it til later." She rolls over to look down into their face, scattering ash over her pretty bedspread. "Do you feel a whole lot?"

Ry drops the book from their face. This must be some sort of purgatory. They hate the universe for making them this way, they hate the universe which made Tinù meaner than what's good for her, and which made that dog chew apart all those animals in the past year, forcing the entire town into a surreal frenzy. And the state would pay a hunter to take the fucking thing out. Dug into people's basements, ripped car tires. They killed it, Tinù had said. They killed it, I promise. You want that picture, don'cha? And Ry had wanted to see it, if only to prove they could see such a dog put to sleep.

Finally, they say, "I feel really high."

She laughs and puts the joint in her music-box-turned-ashtray. "We should start a band. It'd be sick."

"No. Not... What's the word? Not, of us...?"

She blinks her starry rose eyes. "Neither?"

"Mm," they laugh, "neither of us know how to play instruments."

"You look like you would. You're kinda a poser, like that."

They shake their head and pull their left knee to their chest to move it. The physical therapist got into their head about that stuff. "A huh?"

"Y'know, like..." She sighs and taps her fingertips on the box spring, the metal makes dull hard noises at the percussion. "When y' act like y' fit in w' a group of people, but you don' actually do that thing."

"I look like I play music?"

"Sort of."

"I used to have this guitar. I never knew how to play it. Just thought it looked cool."

"What'd'y do, find it in a dumpster?"

They admit, "Well, no-one wants it anymore."

"So you still have it?"

"No. Uh..." They swallow, their throat tastes like earth, like they've licked the churned-up ground and it's flooded their whole brain with ideas, like dropping acid. They feel the way the sky does when the sunset turns inwards, and collapses. "I breaked it. I got really mad, and I break it."

☆

THEN,

1990

AFTER A few more days, Ry feels the weight of the bag buried in her drawer, and she's ready. She doesn't end up feeling sad, or regretful. She doesn't even really hope there's another chance. She thinks Heaven is more of a suggestion, and Hell even less real.

She sits on the porch in the evening and listens to the neighbors. Music, cooking, conversation and door slamming. A couple argues one house down, but a boy on a bike chases a rabbit in the opposite direction. This was what the world was supposed to be like? Cherry clouds and races on pavement? She feels as though she is not watching any of it--she cannot feel her body in a physical sense besides the tangled ache in her chest, which is just as well. It makes her so angry to be alive that when she looks at anything it's with a sense of overexposed dread, though a sick daze. The street goes dark in her mind, and everything floods away.

"Chodź i usiądź," pani Szmytka calls through the cracked window.

Near-silently they eat at the kitchen table, Ry breaks apart a sausage with her fork and taps her heel against the leg of her chair. She doesn't know what to say.

"Jak jest twoja ręka?"

She blinks and curls the fingers of her left hand. "Okej."

"Then what is wrong? You look--"

"No," she sighs, "nothing." She does not want to hear what or how she looks like. She knows the most ambigious and ambivalent answer will crush her.

"I can call out tonight. Would you like me here?"

Rylan tries to act like the offer does not chill her. With, she hopes, next to no emotion whatsoever, she replies, "Nie. Idź."

"Are you sure?"

"Mm, tak." After a moment, for everything, she adds, "Dziękuję."

☆

The lines in her bedroom begin to disappear. The lights are off but the strings of them around the window are on in neon bursts of color. The walls go grey and indistinct like the fur around an old dog's mouth. She weighs the bag in her palm. She bought a ring in it once, at a festival in town, what feels like forever ago, but it was a size too small and only ever fit right on her last finger.

She balls it in her right fist and sighs. Feels the hard cluster of painkillers inside like many small seeds. She supposes it's about the right time. She leans over and dumps the little pile of pills onto her bed, has the urge to count them, then resists. She believes if she lingers too long she will lose confidence--that is, she will lose faith that it will work, not gain a desire to live. After a moment she sits up and lifts her head. Everything is right where it should be: the guitar she painted on instead of playing; the tower of books on the floor, most of them unread; her collection of CDs and tapes altogether of two or three bands; her collection of ratty stuffed animals she finds at the thrift store and makes up backstories for in her head.

She stands and heads for the kitchen. It is stuck in places with light, but the black shapes of the cabinets and the table and the oven remain still. Even the windows and the back door seem only etched into a larger block of onyx, their outlines parallel and immovable. She does not turn on the light, only heads toward the cabinet under near the refrigerator, and feels the shapes of the bottles. She shakes one after the other to gauge their contents, and eventually chooses a square bottle of bourbon. She inspects it in the light from the backyard--the illuminaton borrowed from the silvery streetlights--and finds it the most beautiful color she's ever seen. Amber, thickly red like paint water at the bottom, glowing the yellow of owl's eyes around the edges.

She closes the door to her room, but she doesn't lock it.

Sitting on her pillow, back against her headboard, she moves only her gaze to the sheer-curtained window. The street looks like a photograph, or a still from an idealistic film, from this angle. She swallows from the bottle until she feels borderline sick, then divides her pills into two piles, only so they'll be easier to swallow. When she takes the first one with another shot of liquor she feels a tendril of panic shoot up her spine, but she remembers just why she's doing it and the remarkable sense of peace, even eagerness, prevails again. She takes the last of them a little more bravely, and drinks until she sees no distinction between herself and the grey of the walls.

☆

THEN,

1993

WHY'D Y' break it?" Tinù asks, giggling, blue smoke and dreamy lips.

Ry feels themself falling.

☆

THEN,

1990

RY WAKES up.

The disappointment might be what kills her. The moment she feels her legs and her arms and her stomach on fire, the rest of the room comes into focus and she feels it all. Her body and all the flourishing hate inside it, petals of damp blackened leaves in the place of valves, burst batteries as organs leaking acid, the sour yellow bile that builds in her tight throat. And the weight of the matress underneath her, the cold glass from the windowpane the night thickened to a brew. She has cut back into existence and she cannot stand it.

She jolts and her head barely makes it over the edge of the bed before she pukes liquid. Where it had looked so beautiful hours before, coming out of her the liquor is a stream of dirty water.

A tiredness seeps through her bones and nestles in them. Unsteadily, fluttering between the balls of her feet and her heels, she slips into the bathroom and keeps it dark as she coughs up decaying vomit into the toilet. Every so often she chokes herself to a stop and listens for any movement from upstairs. If she were still asleep, she knows she'd be dead. She closes the lid on the toilet to muffle the flush and spits into the sink.

She cannot stand her bedroom.

Before she can help herself she kicks at the side of the bookshelf, then the chair of her desk, then the guitar leaning there. The instrument makes a complaint of scattered notes, obscenely loud in the middle of the night. She shoves the door closed before nudging the guitar to lie flat on the floor, then jumps on it with a hard, sudden crack.

Fuck. She can't even fucking die right. She can't possibly live her entire life like this. Everything tears itself apart in a ragged disaster, bloody tissue and knives and thorns. It hurts to breathe. She kicks the instrument against the wall in a jumble of scratches, until the smooth curves of wood are at odds with each other, angles and snapped strings like torn-down spiderwebs.

Ry stares down the wreckage and sobs and muffles a scream in her shirt.

"Rylan'? Co to był za hałas?" Pani Szmytka's voice lifts down the stairs like a wind, followed by the patter of footsteps, about the noise.

Ry shakes her bangs over her face and tries to stop crying as she cracks her bedroom door.

"Just car," she lies, wiping her mouth. "Outside."

"Wszystko w porządku?"

She buries a sniff in a cough. "Jestem w okej."

☆

Ryland goes to school two days later, plays her Pac Man in the hallway, stops tasting mud when she inhales.

She walks the long way home, counting the fishermen. The last one seems to be waiting for her. He unlocks his gaze from the glittering rushing water, raises his head, and waves.

She waves back.