Self-Disassembly

Content Warning: Body gore

When I was twenty-four, my body started to eat itself alive.

My immune system started attacking my connective tissue as though it is an invader to my body and not the very structure holding it together. It gnaws at the soft padding between my joints—my elbows, my knees, my hips, my fingers. Any point of articulation where tissue separates bone. One day, I am warned, it could leach into my body cavity and chew up my tender organs.

It is so incredibly painful.

Learning to be in pain is a strange process. Sometimes pain cannot be stopped, cannot be fixed or fully soothed. I take all the limiting measures I can. Painkillers. Medication to suppress my riled immune system. Being gentle with myself. Staying warm. In many small ways, I have moulded my interactions with the world and myself around this constant bodily pain.

And it works, to a degree. My pain is a much smaller thing than it was. My immune system is quietened like a smoked-out beehive, stingless but still humming. I am much better, and as long as the magic spell of my medications holds, I won’t get any worse. But I will likely never be ‘pain free’ again.

Before the medications, a comforting little fantasy grew from my pain. It rooted deep within my brain, mutating in the ways the pain does, moving through my body and nesting where it hurts. This fantasy is a meditation some days, others a craving, a deep bodily want. Some days it is just a wish—a wish to self-disassemble.

In this fantasy, I am a ball-jointed doll. I pop my joints apart, take off whole limbs. First my hip, with its satisfyingly round joint, my leg taken off like a barbie doll’s—spherical nub of bone on one side and a neat concave cavity on the other. I run a cloth under warm water and wipe both sides clean, as though the pain is dust that can be swept away.

I go on, pulling my leg apart at the knee, then the ankle, and one by one, my toes. I don’t stop at my lower body, moving next to my arms—another satisfying ball joint in either shoulder. I can hear the pop! as the pieces come apart. Elbow, wrist, and on particularly bad days, I break myself down to the level of every joint in every finger.

I do this in bed, just before I fall asleep. I lay my limbs out beside me like a splayed-out anatomical model. The feeling is bliss. Painless bliss. The hurting parts of me lie inert and unattached, their agony separated from me by the distance of air. I feel the light breeze from my ceiling fan caressing the cavity of my shoulder, like blowing on a burn.

The fantasy comes to me less now that the pain it speaks to has been settled by medications, my immune system supressed like a crocodile that has had its jaws taped shut. But I have entered a devil’s bargain to halt the deterioration of my joints, selling not my soul, but my innards. New symptoms breed a new fantasy—one fleshier and less clean.

The gastritis, when it comes, makes me want to gut myself like a fish. A gentle blade, in under my sternum and down to my crotch. Opened up, I would slip my fingers inside myself, dipping through layers of skin, subcutaneous fat, and connective tissue.

I start with my stomach. Bilious sack. I pull it out and hold it like a half-filled water balloon. It feels like a warm, slippery goon bag. I tip out its sour contents and carefully turn it inside out. Ulcers stud its lining like razor-shelled barnacles. Dark, weeping little craters, pockmarking me like the surface of the moon. My stomach inverted, I clean it like I am an old-fashioned washerwoman. Not beating it against a rock in a stream but laying it out on a tile in the garden and spraying it with the hose until the corrosive bile is rinsed away by soothingly cool water. Then I leave my traitorous organ in the gentle morning sun.

Next, I unspool my intestines. Small, then large. I hold them like a pâtissier holds a piping bag, gently squeezing them from end to end. And when that doesn’t quite get it all, I poke the hose in one end and watch the water gush out the other until it runs clean.

At the end of it all, I gather up my dripping organs in my arms and hang them from the washing line. Sat beneath them on the garden steps, abdomen open and blissfully empty, I wait for my organs to dry. One by one, I slip them back inside, soft and warm from the sun. Intestines first, small then large, nestling them into the cup of my pelvis, coiled like knitters’ wool. Then my stomach, settled gently on top. I imagine feeling cleansed, the pain washed out with the bile, half-digested muck, and blood. Reset.

But reality’s heavy hand is always on my shoulder, reminding me that I am not a doll that can be pulled apart, or a fish that can be gutted and cleaned. My body is bent on devouring itself. I keep a medicated lid on one condition, but it spills out somewhere else, secondary symptoms the lesser of two evils. My specialist says there isn’t much I can do for the gastritis. When it flares, I take a different pill for a few days, pumping fresh smoke into the hive.

I think often about body neutrality. It is a concept that I hold completely differently to how it is popularly known. It is not my self-perception—it is my memory of a body without sensation. A healthy body. I think of the time when wearing my flesh was nothing at all—when I was unaware of the way my joints compressed, the ways my limbs twisted. I could walk, or run, or even just stand still, and nothing would feel amiss. I could sleep and not turn restlessly under my own aching weight.

I want it back so badly. That is the true seed from which my fantasies have grown. When I sit beneath my imagined clothesline—pegged with organs, clean and drying—what I want, more than anything, is to feel like I did before, when I wasn’t sick, when I wasn’t conscious of the body I was living in. To feel nothing—no pain, no relief, no sensation at all.

To have one more painless moment in the sun.

Caitlin Kelly is a Brisbane/Magandjin based writer. She has recently completed her Creative Writing Masters at The University of Queensland. Her writing has appeared in Underground Writers and upcoming in Science Write Now. She has performed at reading events for Sūdō Journal, The Hearth Collective, and Jacaranda Journal.