Wine dark purple pooling on alabaster white. Fine streaks of burnt orange pulled across a sand shaded background. Shining bright red, perhaps neon perhaps pink, glowing in contrast to a midnight canvas. I’ve always found the various ways blood and skin intermix to be mesmerizingly beautiful. The aesthetics of blood and cuts draws some people in like that cliche about flames and moths…only probably less disastrous?
I’ve never really indulged this inner fascination till recently and I’m not 100% sure why. I’m trying cutting and I’ve not even really dipped my toe in it at all because uh…it scary as fuck in real life. We’ll get to that later, but first I want to explore my wonder why it stayed in the background so long.
When it comes to media, I’ve never really followed gore flicks as they almost always lack the subtlety that calls to me. Crime scenes, surgeries, etcs, all the standard reality voyeurism avenues never really did it either. The equal parts compulsion and revulsion of tragedies always applied to these greater scenes. As a soft square who grew up in a lily white town, with conservative friends, neighbors, parents, I never felt the urge to push further. Or rather the strangeness of it combined with the parts of my reptilian parts of the brain that said “Nah Dog, that shit is bad”, made it so I never went further.
Perhaps it’s because true violence held little appeal to me and honestly still bothers me. Perhaps not though as its the hatred and anger, the emotional outburst, that causes discomfort there. Like most edgy teens I went to faces of death and other gore sites. The still images were so fantastical in their extremeness that they were disconnected from reality. Detached limbs, collapsed skulls, guts strewn everywhere, these neither felt real. I saw little beauty in them too, just meaningless mess. Then I saw two sociopaths beating a homeless man and stabbing him with a screwdriver. That was probably the first time I saw a death, via a computer screen, trophies of people giving into their internal violence. That felt real and just…sad.
The blood I like is more…lifeless? More artistic, separate from the desire to harm and the chaotic nature of serious wounds inflicted through violent means. Ever watch Dexter? Season 1, where the two homicidal sociopath brothers have a different take on blood. If not, whoops spoilers, but yne loves it and craves it, collecting it from each of his victims, while the other can’t stand it and drains his victims before freezing parts of the body leaving cool composed flesh? That shit is so cool and pretty to me. I wish I’d found a way to make that manifest beyond the screen before now.
I wonder how common the phantom urges to splay flesh are? Do we all see those injury moments in movies and feel the tingle in our limbs? The pull to repeat and open up the soft leather exterior that holds our less sturdy meat and liquidy parts together? Do we all dream dreams of blades sliding smoothly into flesh?
Surprisingly none of this is what finally pushed me into wanting to explore. It was seeing period blood create a deep purple pool after parting the red seas one time with my girlfriend Meaghan. Not sure why that struck me so hard, probably because as an american Dude I have been conditioned to not think about the icky time of the month and the mechanics or details of it. Whatever it was that blood pulled me in like gravity and I just knew I wanted to play with it. So I painted on her skin with menstrual blood(which in retrospect might have been a tad weird and gross having not really expressed any interested in blood at all to her) and immediately I was attracted to the look and knew I had to find more.
We talked it over for a bit. She approached her husband to make sure there were no objections and after negotiating with him she agreed to move forward. We, particularly me, did not do enough research. I read some articles, looked through forum posts about getting into, made sure to get fresh, clean, sterilized, sharp blades. Looked up the places that were safer and what weren’t. And I made sure to practice on myself first. That seemed very reasonable to me… I did not do the due diligence of watching some videos on mechanics though and that was stupid.
I never self harmed before. I’ve never cut someone with a blade in anger. I’ve played with swords but with no edges. I’ve shaved with straight razors, but that is actively avoiding being cut. So when I tried my first few attempts surprising did little. One didn’t even split the skin, but they all HURT, so I figured I’d try giving a slightly deeper and faster one to get more blood….and well, that went poorly.
Split the skin very very deep, and like, at first it didn’t even bleed. I could seen the inside of the skin, the fat tissue, the white pink of internal flesh, which was actually super cool. But then I freaked out abit and this wide ass cut. I put pressure and bandages on it for an hour and it was still bleeding through for 2 days. That was not ideal. And the next time I tried cutting, which was on Meaghan I was so scared I’d do the same I barely got blood to come. Done some more research and revising and gonna do more practice cuts on myself but overall excited to open up, heh, this new aspect of play.