The Path Less Taken/The Art That I WAs

I never knew that his every utterance was one of encouragement down this dark pathway. I knew the path was one less trodden, but instead of imagining myself the prey that he knew I was, I saw myself as Nikita or Wasili Andrejitsch. You know, Leo Tolstoi. I saw myself a young Robert Frost. A transman on a new mode, a cutter taking the very invention of cutting itself into my own hands. I didn’t know it would come to this. I didn’t know.

I should have known I was more than his art project. Or was I, really, ever? I was to do as I pleased with my knives and his- oh the glorious assortment of knives there were, blades from razors wiped shiny clean with antiseptic, switchblade knives and hunting knives and a bayonet shaven clear of rust. I did my work as he spread sheets upon sheets of paper across the dark hardwood floor of the near-empty flat. Did I wonder who else’s blood had stained this dark wood? But after all this, after all that’s happened I’m forced to wonder if I am even still more than an artistic viewpoint to him. The Fashion played in the background�" he had told me I could play what I pleased, as after all, I was the one who was enduring what needed to be endured for this piece. He had said it that way, as though I were suffering but we both knew and had discussed at length how I was not. How I loved to feel the trickling of blood and how I loved to feel a blade’s sting. How damn artistic. How damn poetic. It was over such conversations we had met, under a hashtag on the internet in some corner where I didn’t think reality could possibly catch up with me. #selfharm might as well have meant #transformMe to him for what was about to take place. But he had been so alluring, so foreign in his accents and his modern-beyond-modern notions and yet so familiar in his words. Words I had heard before strung together in new orders to mean new things, radical things that had brought me here. To this. A dimly lit apartment where I sat slicing into my own skin.

„This work will live for the ages,“ he had said, then, „now let me feel your pulse.“

And then he had posed me in various ways, drawn strings across my wounds and lain me down across the pages. My blood was to stain these papers, and then? I was suffering from the beginnings of a wave of self hatred, a ‚feeling‘ unlike any other, as though my insides were imploding in a sticky mess and the eye of my mind could see it with every excruciatingly disgusting detail, organs bursting one after another until finally my heart pounded against my hollow feeling chest. He dabbed his large fingers gently at the gashes on my lower leg, spelling out words in my blood on the areas that my bleeding limbs themselves could not reach. If I had only read them, maybe I would have turned back on this path less taken. Maybe I would not have, for curiosity is a most powerful force and who am I to fight against such things. Though then, was it not a reckoning with curiosity and desire itself that had put me atop these papers like a patient undergone the scalpel?

I think I know now I am nothing but art to him, for how he spoke of me, for how he spoke to me. As though I was rare, beautiful. A tragic disarray of parts we both knew didn’t belong. He had offered to get rid of those parts, to help me. I had said yes. And I walked the path less taken, into my own oblivion.