I stared at myself in the mirror for what seemed like hours and loathed what I saw, noting every crease and detail of my nude body, trying to understand. I hated myself physically, not because I was particularly out of shape, or that I deemed myself to be lesser than any other person, but because my body reflected a thing I never chose to be, nor ever felt I was a part of. It displayed for full displeasure a catalyst of everything I thought was wrong in this world, a sapling of some parasitic entity whose thirst was only quenched when all life around it might suffer. Even when my thoughts were all conflicted and I attempted to find some answer in myself, no matter how deep in retrospect I found myself to be, the despise of my person overwhelmed all reason, and my life was peppered with moments of long pause and seething fury as I gazed at my own reflection in that rigid mirror, attempting as best I could to pinpoint the purpose of my stress. It took a lifetime to realize that what I saw was man, or at least a husk of what once was one, and that it infuriated me to the core.
From behind baggy, unrested eyes were memories of a childhood ridden with anger and abuse, a subconscious effort employed at so young an age to try and forget every awful thing I endured. Repressed thoughts were explored by a psychiatrist I was recommended to, my face emotionless but my heart crying, all resurfacing while I held back my aggression until I could come home and be unreasonable to only myself. It is challenging to prevent yourself from murdering a creature you can't stand the presence of as they pick at your brains and feed off your despair, like being reprimanded by society for killing a tick on your arm, but there was great elation in removing one's own flesh when others might not offer to forfeit, because I was one of them. The peeling of skin and hair from a vessel of chaos, an unruly chimp wearing a suit and tie, seemed so right and so pleasurable an experience that it felt fair, almost too good, to feel something shared among all living things and to perhaps temporarily forget that I was human.
Today was different though. Today the magnitude of frustration was only made all the more indefatigable by the fact that I now recalled my own rape as a child. A vivid nightmare once such a well-hidden documentation of my horrific past brought back to life, unbeknownst to myself nor my psychiatrist, all by accident as we attempted to discover my history of violence and the root cause therein. It may have explained much of my life, why I seemed cold and why I was prone to immense despair on the slightest whim, but the realization was so incredibly sudden that it didn't seem true, like being read a fairytale and told you were the protagonist and that every bizarre and mystical event really happened. I gazed at my nude body in the mirror, holding a razor in one hand and towels in the other, pondering all the while about what I felt needed doing because it hurt so badly to be a member of a species that would consider committing such indecency to the innocence of early life. I saw that dangling little apparatus between my legs, and although it always caused me great displeasure to look at I now had a reason to despise its presence, to affix blame and guilt to a symbol of sodomy and blood-covered connection. I now understood what needed to be done, to acquire the link to acceptance and to separate myself from the cruel nature of people that conflicted within, to undo the bonds that deformed me and made all the animals fear me by proxy. I needed to remove my mankind.
It needed to come off.
