I have a demon living in my leg. It is nestled deep below my flesh, far below the surface where anyone can see, invisible and out of sight. Yet I can feel it in the razor edges of its shape. I feel it as it pierces deeper toward my skeleton. The intruder roots deep in my hip joint, embedded under the attachment of my leg. Then it entwines its barbed tentacles around my shape, binding and restraining me.
I hear it laugh when I try to stand up quickly. I feel its claws snag and catch my nerves as I struggle to move. It paralyzes me, nullifying my brain’s commands with the garbled static of pain.
I imagine the demon with long, electrified tentacles, which it whips around at random. I feel them coil around my nerves and send flashes of pain over my nervous system. I imagine it has horrendous razor teeth, sharp points that plunge into my soft tissue if I offend it. I see the demon the color of dark, oxygen-deprived blood and misshapen like a tumor.
In short, my hamstring injury continues. The MRI identified it as a tear, but to me, it feels like this relentless demon.
If I am honest with myself, the kind of soul-crushing honest that one maybe should not put on the internet, I invited this demon in. Not with my obsessive exercise. Not with my compulsive over training. Not with my complete disregard for my body’s pain signals and warnings. No, I all but directly conjured it.
When I was younger and lost in my own darkness, I coped through self-mutilation. My pain was so great and my mind was so fractured that I both grounded myself and released myself with minor cutting or burning. The physical pain brought clarity, dredged me up back to the real world from the distorted trap in my mind.
It was a horrible coping device that obviously did more harm than good, and thankfully, I was only entangled in it for a short time. It was a crucial step on my descent to my bottom. At the bottom, I discovered myself and started becoming who I am today. Yet there was an enticing honesty about it. A rawness in the complete embrace of the pain, both mental and physical. The behavior felt pure and unfettered by rules or expectations.
Despite knowing how outlandishly crazy these feelings are and moving well past the behavior, at times I endure a certain nostalgia for it. The kind of delusional fondness one could only feel for something so destructive after over a decade. I have not placed blade to my skin since I was in my latest teens, and that gap has permitted a perverted ideation to blossom.
I never thought I wanted to cut myself again. I never had an impulse to injure or hurt myself. I was not even upset or depressed. Ironically, I found myself in a level, balanced, even happy place. Yet, I found strange thoughts bobbing up in my brain. A weird sort of desire to have a minor injury to nurse, some minor physical pain. Perhaps a rebellion to the uncharted territory of sanity and happiness, as fleeting as it ever is.
I am such an idiot.
My body answered. In a dazzling display of self-preservation, it gave me what I wanted.
Instead of granting me a small little physical irritant, a little pacification of my old demons, it went grand. I cannot say that I blame it; how could I expect any different from MY body? I do nothing a little. To answer me, it ripped my damn hamstring and provided me with more pain than I knew how to cope with. I asked for a cup of water and got a firehouse. My clever body flooded me with pain so that I would never be foolish and moronic enough to wish for it again.
I did this to myself, with my own mental defects and stupidity. I invited this suffering, and for being so foolish, I deserve it. The injury is not the problem. It is not the demon at all. It is me; I am the demon within.
Christina Bergling
Fiery Pen 