Word: bladed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...night this girl's terror became too much. She sat alone in a bathroom, dark except for the blue-white light of the streetlamp outside spilling across her hands, her wrists, the small square of the razor blade as it moved closer to her soft web of veins. She imagined blood spilling over white porcelain; she imagined the end. But someone had told her something long ago when she was a child--that God put each of us here for a reason. A thought took shape in her mind, even through the jangle of nerves and the blur...
...story would be neatly tied up if I said that, after that night, after I put away the razor blade, I never did drugs again. But stories are rarely that neat. It was years before I stopped. I lost work, I risked my life, I even stole prescription drugs from people's medicine cabinets. I would reach past the razor blades and grab the pills. Dying can be accomplished in many ways...
...back of old medicine cabinets, you may still see the little mail slot - blackened with rust at the edges - through which a man of another time would push a used razor blade, dropping it into a mysterious, never-seen depository, the graveyard of unkeen but still raggedly dangerous blades: a black hole...
...When I was a child the blade slot fascinated me. Children have a highly developed sense of metaphysics. The slot seemed a tear in time, as if the blade that had just shaved my father, nicking his jawline, had for punishment been exiled to another dimension. That bourne from which no traveler returns. The wafer-thin blue blade was condemned to slide out of this world and to turn slowly in the black space that began on the far side of the inside of the mirror...
...sight of the blade slot made me think - if you will excuse these featherweight reflections - about the old rituals. Long ago, when men wore hats, shaving was a far more serious and ceremonial business than it is now. I keep to some of the old forms. I use a shaving brush, for example...