The first time he cut me was not that long after we’d met. I asked him to – it was just one item on a long list of wonderful and terrible things I wanted us to do together. I am good at pain when I can move with it – arch, writhe, dig my little fists into soft furnishings or flesh. I am considerably less good at coping when I have to stay still. And thrashing around when someone is cutting you with a knife is a very bad idea indeed. I liked the idea of challenging myself. More than that, I liked the idea of him cutting me.
The knife he cut me with that night wasn’t the sharpest – which actually makes being cut more painful, as it drags through and tears your skin rather than cutting it cleanly – but it looked very threateningly knife-like, the kind of knife a pirate might press against your throat in a film or a low-budget erotic fantasy novel. Since then, we have evolved our things-Zero-gets-cut-with kit to a worryingly efficient looking little case of very sharp, replaceable scalpel blades. It is neat, medical. The knife was neither of those things but exactly what I wanted to see in that moment, glinting dully by fairy-light as we sat in his bedroom and discussed what was going to happen.
I wanted the cuts somewhere private that I could cover, as I had regular swim dates with a friend at the time. I was concerned that knife marks could be misconstrued as self-harm, that I might worry or trigger someone if I had visible cuts on my body. We agreed on my arse, and he asked me what I wanted him to cut. I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really know. I wasn’t interested in patterns or significance. I just wanted him to cut me. I wanted to feel skin parting, I wanted to feel myself bleed, I wanted to be scared enough of something to hold myself still.
He suggested his initials and I can still remember how I felt then – careful, mostly. But such a deep and visceral feeling of no. Not that. On paper I barely knew this man, and our relationship seemed to solely extend to the bizarre, the fucked-up, the “absurd and awful” as I once described it to him in an overwrought e-mail. He often left me feeling like the punchline of a joke I didn’t understand. I was not having his name on my body. No fucking way.
What I said instead was, “Maybe just some lines?”
When he cut me that night it didn’t feel like I expected it to feel. He was hurting me in a myriad of other ways, with other things, and initially I didn’t even realise it had happened. He had to grab me by the hair and lift my head to show me the blade, dotted with dark little beads of blood. I felt a tiny jolt of something – self preservation? Shock? Adrenalin? My heart beat a little faster. He held eye contact as he licked the blade. He cut me more after, and I could feel it, then. I’d imagined the pain as sharp, neat, somehow bright. Instead it felt like someone doggedly pulling at an untidy seam. Messy and maddening. He cut a cross-hatch of lines and lines under the curve of my right buttock and to my chagrin it was only with a great amount of contortion that I could see it in the mirror.
Months later, for Valentine’s day, he cut me again. A little K underneath my left breast – the first letter of his name. By then it felt different to have him on my skin. The implications didn’t raise my hackles – it made me feel something else entirely. The next time we saw each other he confessed he was falling in love with me and I felt like I’d started breathing again, like I finally had a name for the thing I’d been twisting myself up about for weeks.
I still have that little K, etched on to my skin. He re-cuts it for me every time it fades. There are other things linking us together now – my collar, matching ink, engagement rings. Despite this, I’m inordinately fond of my K. I’ve suggested scarification – having him peel away my skin so it becomes a permanent mark. But the ceremony of redressing it when it fades is as much a part of the mark as the mark itself. Sometimes when he cuts me I bleed profusely, sometimes barely – a cat scratch at most. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I watch him quiet and calm, and more often I wait until he lifts the blade and I have a chance to kick my feet and roll my spine, hissing through my teeth at the pain I cannot shake out in the moment.
It is a reminder in the mirror that I am not alone – that I am not, in fact, my own. That I belong to him. I carry him here on my skin, right above my heart, and I hope I always will.
