by SM Colgan
TW: Self-Harm
The desire is there, unquenchable. It comes all too often, tingling in your fingertips, the ghost impression of cold metal, a thin sliver of steel. One slash, the slit opens up, dark blood beading out, marking a line of betrayal.
Oh how you trembled last time, whole tremors shaking your body, knees weak.
It is not that there was any great trauma, any defining moment leading to this. There is simply a collection of pauses. That is what they will say, when the time comes to write the last word on all of this. No tragedy of heroics, no pinnacle or nadir. Simply a collection of pauses, impressions where something might have been, where the great whispered crime fanned out of. The scattered nodes of a point cloud, too loose for a mesh to render.
SM Colgan (she/her) is a bi writer somewhere in Ireland. Her work focuses on emotion, history, sexuality, and relationships, romantic and otherwise. She writes to understand people who are and have been, and to ease the yearning in her heart. Twitter: @burnpyregorse.
Emerge Literary Journal 