The razor bit my skin as I drew it slowly across my wrist. The pain was delayed and then burst red as my skin cried blood. It was beautiful. I believed in true beauty and I truly believed that my pain, my darkness, my pit of teenage angst and hormonal despair was truly beautiful. I found that beauty would drive me to the edge, teasing and taunting me to take a breath and jump into what I loved the most. It wouldn’t have been dangerous if I had loved and appreciated pretty faces and classical music. Instead, I valued pain and horror. If I did see a pretty face, I had to use all my restraint to keep from scratching and marring it. When I heard a pastel piece of music, I would run to my piano and bang the noise out of my memory. I wanted to be terrifying; I wanted to be beautiful.
   Each day I would dress in black, spike my hair, and put on the darkest eyeliner I could find. My mom and dad used to drop quite remarks about how boys shouldn’t wear makeup and give condescending eyerolls and sighs. That used to be enough- the eyeliner and the spiked hair. After a while, I needed more. I started punching holes through my body. I had a noise ring, a lip ring, a tongue ring, numerous earrings, yet loading myself up with metal still seemed like it wasn’t enough. That’s when I started cutting. It seemed like nothing in the world can be more beautiful then pain, but pain had to be visible to be beautiful. I always had pain. To make pain, to make any emotion visible, is to amplify it so loud that the emotion screams for forgiveness. My pain was so intense, so black, that it ate away at my insides. Sometimes I felt like I would burst from the beauty that was my pain.
   I don’t really know where all my pain came from. Why wasn’t I happy? How come I couldn’t just put on a mask like everyone else? This is how I tied beauty into my life. I found that the most beautiful things were the true things in life. The masks of teenagers everywhere were happy and superficial. I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to be true.
One day in my English class we were told to write a poem about something beautiful. When I turned in my poem my teacher read it and sent me to the Principal’s office. She signed a small pink piece of paper and sent me off to walk the deserted empty, white hallways of my school. I remember looking at the red lockers along the walls thinking about how my blood was that same colour. I took out my knife and, as I was walking, sliced open my palm. I felt better. I felt relief. I tucked the knife into my back pocket and sucked on my cut as it welled up and dripped blood. Once I was in the office, I handed the pink piece of paper to the secretary. She read it and handed the paper back to me. It was then that I read what was on it.“Urgent. Suicide note in assignment. Please contact parents.” was scribbled in curvy handwriting. It made me laugh. My laugh was not filled with joy. It wasn’t smooth and calm like so many laughs I had heard. It was bark of irony. The paper made me laugh because I had not written a suicide note, I had written of beauty. What I found beautiful, however, was not acceptable to society. I sat down on a blue cushioned chair. There was a girl sitting next to me, her hands folded neatly in her lap. I glanced at her quickly and then my eyes traveled down toward her hands again. She wore a long-sleeved green blouse, but her sleeve had been pushed forward and I saw bright jagged marks on her arms. It shocked me. I had never seen anyone else ever cut themselves like I did.
  She shifted uneasily in her seat, her long brown hair sliding over her shoulders. It seemed like I spent forever looking at her wrists. I wanted to reach out and to touch those jagged marks on her arms.  I wanted to kiss them and tell her how beautiful they were. I wanted to share all of my thoughts with her, all of my darkest moments. I wanted to ask her if she thought my arms and hands were beautiful. Instead I just sat there in silence, the computers and lights giving a silent buzz that filled the whole office with a solemnness. The kind of stern silence that I didn’t even dare whisper in.
   I finally tore my eyes away from her arms an uncurled my stinging fist. It still hadn’t stopped bleeding and I hoped that no one would try and shake my hand. I was just about to curl my hand back up in a fist when I heard the girl next to me give a small gasp. She grabbed her sleeve and tugged it down, then touched my shoulder lightly. “Why?” she breathed, too cautious to actually speak in our prison-like waiting room. I looked up at her. I hadn’t seen her face before, I was too busy looking at her cuts. Now  I saw her face and it was like I was looking into a mirror. I knew at that moment when I looked into her eyes that we shared all of our thoughts, all of our sadness, all of our pains and darkness. “You know why.” I whispered back to her. She leaned back in her chair and smiled. She was sad and so was her smile, as if she were looking back on a nostalgic memory. “What are you here for?” I asked her. I wanted to keep looking at her, I wanted to keep the connection that we had, but it was faded and the intensity of what I had felt was dissipating.
   “I’m new. Come to get class registration. My name’s Josie, by the way.” She spoke a bit louder, but her voice was still breathy and soft. I kept looking at her, but she had stopped looking at me and was looking down at her feet.  She knew what we had seen in each other and it was like sharing everything we had ever kept secret. It was embarrassing, but I didn’t want her to be embarrassed. “What are you here for?” she asked me. “Suicide note. I guess.”
   “You guess?” she looked up at me, her eyes curious.
   “yeah, I guess. I wasn’t thinking about suicide, I was thinking about pain. But I guess the teacher thought they were the same thing.” I shifted uneasily in my chair. Now that the moment had passed, I had become uneasy around her. We sat in silence for a while. A woman came out and handed Josie a piece of paper and started to explain the classes she had. Before she got up to leave she leaned over towards me.
   “Hey, what’s you name?” she asked.
   “Peter.” I said. She smiled at me and it wasn’t as sad as last time.
   “I hope I see you around, Peter.” Then she was gone.
The next day I sat in a white room at a white table in between my parents and across from the Principal and the school psychiatrist. They all talked about me as if I wasn’t there. My parents read my poem and my mother reached over to me and took my hand. She said she thought the poem was beautiful and that they would take care of things. The ride home was spent in thick, unbreakable silence. When we all got home my dad told me he trusted me to make a man’s decision about what to do with my life and my mother gave me a hug and started dinner. They knew that I had only written a poem. They were the people in my life who knew me almost as well as I did. I didn’t cut my parents off from my life like many rebellious young people would do. I loved them and I always would because I knew I got that same love from them. They treated me the same, still shaking their heads at my eyeliner and black fingernail polish.
   At school the teachers would watch me like vultures, ready to jump on my if I held a pair of scissors the wrong way. It was unnerving. I would go into the bathroom stall and pull out my knife. I drew it across my wrist and watched the cut hesitate, then spill blood. I would sit there watching the blood drip to the floor until it stopped bleeding. Then I would wipe the blood up and go back to class, hiding my arms with long sleeves and black fishnet material. I kept thinking of the girl in the office, of how we were so similar. I hadn’t seen her since then and I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to look into her eyes and feel what I had felt then. That connection between the two of us.
   At lunch one day I saw her with a group of girls. They were all giggling and laughing and as I got closer I realized they were talking about what boys they had crushes on and who looked the best in what colour. They were all wearing tight blue jeans and pastel coloured shirts. There were five of them all sitting and gossiping with their makeup perfectly perched upon their faces. I wanted to rip all that goop off and expose them for who they really were. I wanted to tear off their giggling mask and make them face reality without hiding. Instead I sat down next to them and looked at Josie. The table got quiet and all of the girls looked scared and nervous. “Hi, Josie.” I said to her. “Remember me? In the office. Suicide-boy. Peter.” I kept fishing around names for myself, trying to get some clue of recognition from her. “I remember you, Peter. I told you I’d see you around.” She smiled and got up from the table. She motioned for me to get up and we walked outside. It was windy day and yellow leaves whipped by us as we walked in silence.
   When we reached the area where the relocatables of the highschool were, she took my hand and lead my behind the furthest re-lo from the school. We stopped walking and she turned to me, her eyes searching for something from me. She paused and then took off her light pink overshirt. “This is what I’ve done.” she said. She was shivering in the cold as her exposed, pale arms shone with scars, bruises, and fresh cuts.
   I took her arm and looked at every scar, every cut, every imperfection that made her perfect. Some of her scars were in designs. She had three stars and a perfect circle on her right arm. I stared at the circle and then reached out and brushed my fingers lightly over the scar tissue. Josie shivered and I wasn’t sure if it was from the wind of from me touching her. “How’d you do this?” I asked her, touching the circular scar.
   She explained to me how she’d heated up a circle of metal and let it melt her skin. She went over each scar and told me each story of how it had happened and what she had done it with. “Now it’s you turn,” she said.
   I took off my overshirt, the sharp wind taking frozen bites at my skin. Josie touched each of the scars along my wrists and my arms. I told her about each one, just as she had done with her scars. She told me they were beautiful and that she wished I didn’t hide them. After I put my shirt back on, fixing my sleeves so they carefully covered the length of my arms, we began walking again. We kept walking and didn’t bother to go back to school that day. I started telling her what I thought of true beauty and what I thought of pain. She would respond to what I said with an occasional agreement and after a while, she took my hand and we walked together like it was the most natural thing in the world to do.
   Time always seemed to be at a standstill when I was with Josie. Often, we would just walk in silence, bathing in the sheer joy of just existing together.
   I eventually asked her out, even though it wasn’t a needed question. We would hold hands in school and sneak out at lunch to kiss behind the re-los.
   We had been together for a long time. Maybe four or five months. Whenever she came over to my house, my parents would play perfect hosts and treat us with milk and cookies. I never had a girlfriend before, and I think my mom thought I was healed. She thought I was cured of my incredible angst and despair. I was not, of course. Josie and I would go into my room and turn up the music real loud. We would sit on the floor or bed and reopen our scars. We would create new ones. We would kiss the blood off each other’s arms and pretend we lived in a world only existing of the two of us.
   Sometimes we would go over to her house. Her parents usually weren’t home. We would go into her room and talk and kiss. One day she had a small square piece of metal in her hand. It was bent perfectly and had a hand hold on it. The way it was bent resembled a kind of cattle brand and when I looked at it, I could almost smell burning flesh. She began heating it up with a red lighter.
   “Peter,” she began, “I lo... I think I love you.”
   I leaned over and kissed her soft pale cheek.
   “I know I love you. Since the day we met.” I whispered to her.
We looked at each other and had that connection I felt the first time we met. It was intense and hot, as if we were one person in two bodies. Every question I ever had about her was answered in that look. Every uncertainty and misgiving or doubt in my mind was erased by the truth enveloping both of us.
   She took my left arm and dropped the lighter on the floor. The piece of metal was hot and glowing. She reached up and pressed the square shape into my inner arm, right above and behind my elbow. I gasped. It was a red hot pain, the colour the metal square glowed. My skin smoked and sizzled. Josie took off the metal and blew on my melted flesh. After a moment passed, she leaned down and kissed the burn as gently as a butterfly walks on flowers.
   I felt intoxicated. My eyes were half closed. I leaned down and kiss her and took her hand in mine. I took the still hot piece of metal and pushed it against her skin as she had done with me. Her eyes widened and then closed. I felt the same thing; riding the line between what was pain and what was a beauty and desire so untamed and so raw. It was lion, majestic and beautiful, yet too dangerous to caress.
Our burns healed after a while, forming perfect squares on our inner arms. It was more intimate then a kiss and more beautiful then all that a rose resembles. I loved being with her, being a part of her.
   One day, we decided to cut classes. We both just left the school, not bothering to take our things. We held hands and walked around the town. We stopped at a local restaurant and ate lunch. We talked and Josie would laugh at an occasional cheesy joke I would throw at her.
   When we got downtown, the sun started going down and we both needed to go home. She asked if I could walk her home and I told her I would because I wanted to be with her up until the very last moment. It was strange. I had never cared about anyone so intensely as I did Josie.
   The sun was almost completely gone and Josie said we were almost to her house and that her father could probably drive me home. I pressed the round silver button on the street lamp as we held hands while we were crossing the intersection, a car swerved through the road. I could see it happening in slow motion. I was dressed in black and was barely visible to the driver. Josie was behind me, hidden from view. I moved out of the way, but Josie was still there, torn at which direction to run. I ran toward her, ready to push her out of the way, but it was too late.
   Josie’s scream cut into the night like a knife. It sent shivers down my spine as I ran towards her. Her shriek froze time and everyone around to here it. Before I had time to react to her scream, I saw where she was. My mind refused what it was being shown, but nothing changed. She lay the middle of the street surrounded by blood. I didn’t know what to do. I was scared. The night had enveloped everything now and it was so dark. I ran to Josie and I rested her head in my lap. My tears hit her face like hot wax as she looked up at me. Her eyes were only half open, and I felt how warm her head was. I looked down, and the back of her head was bleeding. I felt her body, trying to feel for broken bones, but her hand grabbed mine and she pulled me close to her face.
   “Shhh,” she whispered.
   “Listen to it. So dark. So black.” She reached up and touched my cheek lightly.
   “What is beauty?” She whispered to me.
   “What is beauty?”
   The ambulance came screaming down the street, but Josie was already dead. She lay lifeless in my lap as I wept onto the cold grey pavement. The ambulance wheeled her off on a stretcher and they took me with her. I sat in the ambulance covered in her blood and looked down at my hands. She just lay there, so raw and real. It was so hard to grasp, so hard for me to deal with. It felt like I could never be the same again.
   I remembered Josie’s words. Everything she had said to me would play over and over again in my mind like a broken record. I remembered how raw she looked, her limp body covered in blood and pain. I realized that this is not what beauty is. I cannot cover up raw pain to make it beautiful. I looked in the mirror and realized that by covering myself up, I was wearing a mask just like everyone else. I was hiding what I was because I couldn’t handle it.
   The next day at school, I took out all my piercings, and I washed the gel and makeup out of my hair and face. I took off my dark clothes and put on a a pair of old plain jeans and a white tank top.  When I went to school the next day, I remember everyone was watching me. My arms felt so exposed and naked. My scars and cuts, my exterior pain was not only out in the open, but was screaming soundlessly at everyone I walked by.
   They could see the blackness that was me and the sorrow like a ball and chain I wore around my arms. I did this because I wanted them to see what was real. I wanted them to take off their masks and see the shocking truth of what pain and beauty is.