This is Frida

This is Frida's story.

I was mourning the death of my father. More to the point, I was coming to terms with the constant missing that one has to become accustomed to after a loved one dies. The “deafening silence”.

I was 18, living in Montreal and on my own for the first time. It was too cold to go outside, and it would have been too cold regardless of the weather. I had decided that self-destructing was the only adequate way to show how I felt. The world was going on as if nothing had happened and I resented the fuck out of it. So, I fasted regularly, stopped attending school, and watched sad films. That was my life. No friends, no phone calls. I had a stack of films by the bed, and that was my main form of human contact. I sometimes talked back to the characters. I refused my mom’s frantic phone calls.

One night I was watching a film and eating greasy Chinese food that I had had delivered at 3 A.M. It was part of the fasting cycle, the gorging after the week of deprivation. I looked down at all the empty containers and felt so disgusting and grotesque for allowing myself to eat all that disgusting food. I wanted to punish myself. More than anything, I wanted to feel anything but the weird numbness I felt.

I cut myself with a serrated kitchen knife. I had never done it before and I have never done it since. I’m not a “cutter” in the sense that it was never a habit. The scars are almost gone now, so maybe I’m glad that I won’t have anything to explain to curious boyfriends and concerned friends.