Peeling Ego

t/w: self-harm, gore, psychosis

For a few moments, there was only darkness.

Retrospectively, this was the most comfort I felt during my time on the island. Darkness was simple and predictable and, though I didn’t know it then, allowing darkness to dominate my peripheral vision would be the last time I ever felt in control.

The abyss in front of me was what I imagined to exist after death; or rather, I saw what I imagined to be non-existent after death: the banality. The elusive vacancy I imagined to tenuously envelop my future corpse. I was never so half-witted as to believe in powers greater than myself, to assign meaning to my being via equally unprovable and unfalsifiable divine entities. I’d never have fallen for His allure or His façade. His fallacy.

There was only so much that I could accomplish blind. Somehow, I had to open my eyes. Soot and salt had sealed my eyes shut, and the conscious effort it took to open them had made me more aware of my surroundings. I could hear the sea. I could feel the sea. I could taste it and smell it. I was astutely aware of the heavy weight in my heart, knowing that I was soon to face an arduous journey, alone.

Opening my eyes was the first of these challenges. With the salty lubricant of either sweat or tears, I didn’t know, and the support of my hands, grasping my eyelids with my palms pressing into my cheeks and eyebrows, I pried open my left eye.

One more to go.

Opening my right was even more of a strenuous task. With enough force to rip open a hollow cinderblock, I tore my eye open. Literally. One half of my vision was blurry and blue, from the ocean ahead, and the other half was red. I tore my eyelid vertically in half, upwards, and collapsed to the floor, writhing in the agony invoked by my actions. I unzipped a small wound into a larger injury, one I was no longer numb to. I was bloodily unwrapping my soul. I was preparing it for departure.

This was the first of my many mistakes.

No. It was wrong to breathe. My first mistake was trying. ‘Consequences’ is also an understatement – torment and punishment were more apt states to describe my situation.

For the rest of the time that I was stranded, the blood that streamed from and escaped my eyelid stained my face and hands. I knew this by the red figure. The vermillion blur. The image I saw when staring down at the sea. Befitting my circumstances, I had to look down to see myself. The image was merely a refracted echo of the model I believed myself to be, the model I missed, the model I’d never see again. Blemishes and aberrations were the only distinguishable traits when I looked down on myself.

I became a canvas for a divine force to look upon and point at when emblazoning and immortalising the worst that a human being could experience.

I hoped that the artist would fail to separate his art from his canvas. I dreamt of us sitting together, watching the installation peel, decay, and crumble. I imagined the paint bleeding into the ocean, creating a lesson on the sins of man and tethering it to the seas that surround him. I wanted to watch the sun reflect from his palette and juxtapose the medium itself, losing warmth and fidelity, obscuring and dissolving.

My face was decorated with my blood and oozing pus.

I needed to leave the island.

It was only a few meters in width and length, mostly pronounced by jagged rocks and sand that were once coral. Two palm trees stood with minimal rooting; I deduced through their visible aridity and the lack of freshwater that could be uprooted that both were completely dead, all the way through. I would later become jealous of those two.

It wasn’t just the sea that salted my wounds, but the lifeless palm trees performed tawdry, plaintive, budgetary imitations of the ones from my visit to LA. The visit that this detour was diminishing.

I assumed that the island was once part of a greater whole and the rest had collapsed. Maybe the rest had fallen in a landslide or eruption. Maybe divine intervention had seen to it that I had minimal resources. The suggestion that the divine had willed my suffering no longer seems unsensible to me. In all honesty, I find that assessment reassuring. It’s a thin thread to cling to that gives my turmoil purpose.

Two items on the island were completely alien to its jagged and natural formation. A rope-woven sack of oranges, and an item sheathed in leather. These items must have travelled with me when the hull of our cruise burst open in the kitchen.

I had every tool I needed to forge a raft of the dead trees and escape the island.

I was cautious of how the death of the trees may have made them more likely to sink, but I clung to my knowledge about the salinity of the surrounding body of water, and how it made most objects more likely to float. These thoughts didn’t matter, though.

I removed what I believed to be a tool called a butcher’s saw from its sheath. I’d seen chefs confidently use these to cut through the bones of animals for cooking. I began sawing one of the palm trees, but lacked the strength to make any significant progress. I ate an orange. I ate another orange. The citrus acid surrounded my teeth and slid abrasively down my throat. They were terrible. After an hour or so of sitting with a nebulous, empty mind, I felt prepared to tackle the tree again.

I hooked my left arm around the dead pillar and prepared to saw with my right, intimately pulling the tree closer for ease. My sawing was significantly more effective, for a moment.

After an extended period of repeating the same motions, the sawing became a more exhausting task, as though I had suddenly encountered something more robust, more… crunchy.

The artist snidely daubed the right forearm of my canvas with oil paint.

Tendons and arteries caressed, coloured, and incriminated the cold and oppressive ridges of the butcher’s saw. They were all my own. The monotonous task of sawing had exhausted all my processing; I initially lacked the capacity for pain. Cutting into my ulna stole my attention from the void, the abyss.

With enough time, sand bandaged the wound. Dry, white, salty sand clung to the tendons and skin that hung from my hanging forearm. Seawater was most likely stroking the edges of my nerves and bone marrow.

In a different land, the tiny, tainted red crystals that lined themselves neatly into my arm like shiny sprinkles on bloody cake icing would be reflecting the sun gleefully with purpose. A magpie or fox would see the beacon from a mile away and eat me. They could end this.

I never returned to the task of making a raft.

I once read that the call of leopard seals, when heard underwater at proximity, could obliterate the human brain through the sheer force of the vibrations which were amplified by the density of the ocean. My brain could have leaked out from my ears, had I been subject to the presence of a leopard seal. I also remember thinking about how they could grow to around 600kg and swim at 25 mph. One of them could definitely destroy my raft and kill me. They would have pulled me apart, mercilessly using my self-inflicted injuries as zippers.

I was also obnoxiously aware of the threat of water pressure. Had my corpse fallen off my raft and sunk, or had I been dragged underwater, the water pressure could have crushed my skull, merged my organs, and popped my eyes like sweets. The remaining pulpous mass of my being could have had its mind – a smoothie, and its skin – a flimsy bag to contain the burst remains. No one would know of my death. Nothing would be left to resonate.

Further reading on my prior travels elaborated that marine mammalian predators are extremely intelligent to a human perspective and have been known to engage in killing for fun. Orcas and dolphins lack respect for the physical or sexual boundaries of other species, and orcas can swim up to 54 kilometres an hour and travel over 160 kilometres in a given day. If one had glimpsed the red glisten from my forearm, even from a mile away, it’d be blessed with a new meal. With the benefit of hindsight, I would have been blessed too.

I also knew that most marine predators, mammalian or not, could smell blood for many miles. I had a lot of exposed wounds. I was painted all over.

Thoughts like these defined my following actions on the island.

A silly thought: I could have created a crossword from all of my procrastination. All of my existential thoughts. My Dad had called me a cruciverbalist in jest, though I did have a knack for them. Whilst my body was a painting to depict the sins of man and their corresponding repercussions, my mind could have become a puzzle to portray the many anxieties of the sinner. Would the divine have liked that?

Man had never been blessed with the strength to front the ocean, but if God was real, it seemed sensible that he would have turned his back on life once it left the ocean and spawned arthropods. He hadn’t revoked our intelligence yet, and I intended to not give my own up. Only an idiot would continue trying to make a raft.

A sillier thought: I was not an idiot. I was smart.

Many days passed.

I was surrounded by fruit. The divine was real and pitied me. I foolishly believed this to be the case.

The fruits in question were grapes, and I ate them confidently. They flowed between each of my fingers and lacked the juice I expected, providing a grittier crunch instead. They weighed down my stomach and filed my throat, grating my oesophagus like lime skin to top the grapes in my body. I still ate them freely. Only an idiot wouldn’t abuse this opportunity.

The opportunity lasted for the rest of my time on the island. I was treated to grapes. A plethora of food surrounded me and hid the sand that existed prior, which I cared not to expose or feel.

I felt the guts of my canvas spray painted red.

Many days passed.

I forgot to eat oranges most days.

My shit was red, and it hurt to stand.

I picked up my last orange and attempted to dig my nails into the fruit. My strength was not enough. I decided that if I lacked the capacity to impale the orange, I might be able to use pure grip to peel it instead.

I utilised every contour of my fingerprints and slowly clasped my hands around the orange, preparing to strain all of my remaining muscles to obtain sustenance.

I stared out to the sea for a moment. I had failed to appreciate the beauty of it. It could revoke my life so easily and yet it had taken all my effort to maintain myself. The sun folded over the waves of the sea and highlighted its form and ipseity. To die then, to the sea, would have been a nice way to sever myself from the mortal realm and pass on, but that was not my fate.

I shuddered before directing all of my remaining energy into my fingertips.

My skin peeled.

The canvas ripped.

Yellow fat and pus made their presence known on top of the amalgamation of dry, red, and white muscle beneath my fingers. My body no longer had the capacity to circulate blood freely and make my hands bleed. The skin hung loosely, dripping the remainder of my dehydrated blood like a cheap rusty tap. The skin was a door into my body, and I could see strings of clotted blood and tendons clinging to its hinges.

I fell into the ocean, bashing my head into the rocks.

With my last moments of clarity, I knew that it was sand – not grapes – in the pit of my stomach that weighed me down.

With my last breath, I reached out to the ocean and dunked my leaking fingers in the water. I believed that a leopard seal might smell my blood and drag me to the ocean floor, causing my body to crumple.

I looked out to the sea and hoped to see an orca nearby.

I could feel the synapses of my neurons fail to breach past the lump of stone now lodged in my temple, obstructing coherent thought and my functioning of being.

As I stared out into the ocean, I hoped that the artist would fail to separate his art from his canvas. I dreamt of us sitting together.

With the last signals that made their way through my brain, I thought myself an idiot.