Upon contact, blood pours out. As you scrape across the surface, the blood spreads and bleeds through. You're hurting and want to do whatever makes you feel better. As it cuts through the seams, you let out every feeling of dread and despair. One for the person who called you stupid the other day. One for the argument you had with your parents. One for the test you failed. One for the people who are always rude to you. It hurts, but you feel better after you do it because you have finally had a chance to let all of those feelings out without anyone seeing you cry. Instead, you watch as it dries. You watch the feelings of pain dry on the surface that you just expressed your feelings on. You watch as a tear falls onto it, making it distorted and you wonder if anyone could see what you had done, if they would care.

You hear footsteps coming towards your room and you quickly shuffle to cover up the evidence of what you had done. At the last second before you have hidden everything, your mother walks in. She smiles and asks how your day at school was. You smile, but it doesn't reach your eyes, and you tell her that you had a good day. In your mind, you think about your day and about how bad you thought it was, but you continue to smile anyway. She must notice the falter in your smile, because she comes to sit down next to you on the bed. As she sits, she feels something hidden underneath the covers of your bed. You begin to look away, knowing you had been caught. She stands up and lifts your covers and she looks over to you with a confused look on her face. You look down, shame crossing your features as she picks it up.

"You haven't written in your journal since you were little, is something wrong?", she says as she looks over the book in her hands. You look up to her and meet eyes as yours fill with tears. She frowns and sits beside you. You hug her as she opens the book, waiting for your permission. She looks over the pages, reading every word. The impact of the words brings tears to her eyes and she looks to you. She asks if you actually felt like dying and you nod. She hugs you tighter. As she turns to the last page you had written on, she reads your last line. 'Would anyone even care if I died?'

As she tells you she loves you and tells you how much you mean to her, a single teardrop falls onto the page. The ink runs and bleeds through the page right next to the teardrop that had fallen from your eyes moments before.



The point of this story is to show how similar the idea of writing and the idea of cutting are. I always tell people there is an alternative for cutting themselves and they never believe me, they believe cutting helps them, but what they don't understand is there are other ways of showing your feelings. In this story, blood signifies ink. Contact, spreading, and cutting signify taking a pencil or pen and writing. The surface signifies the surface of a paper. The teardrop dropping and distorting the image is a teardrop dropping onto a page of written feelings and making the ink run. Changing certain words in this sentence should make the idea of the story different, but it doesn't. You can express you feelings better through writing than you ever could through blood. What I am trying to convey in this short story is a message. A message that shows people that cutting isn't the answer and that there is always an alternative that can bring forth that same mystical connection to happiness that you think hurting yourself brings. There's so much more you can do to make you feel better and it makes me sad that other people can't see this. I take my pain and anger and sadness out on a piece of paper rather than my skin because at least you can erase the marks on paper. I take out my feelings using a pencil instead of a razor because with a pencil, you can do anything. You can write a story, draw a picture, write a letter to someone you care about, and even make up your own world. All you can do with a razor is hurt yourselves and those around you. Through a piece of paper you can convey pain, anger, adventure, mystery, and love. Rather than cutting through the skin that keeps you alive, write on a paper so that a tree out there can smile that it saved you from another scar.