A Knife, A Fire By Virginia Knight

      Robin Kuusela CC



A Knife, A Fire

I always come back to a knife. I know it’s not possible, and it will kill me if I try, but I still fantasize. A doctor would use a scalpel, but I picture my chef’s knife with the wide blade. The chef’s knife I bought when I moved into my first apartment, the one that lives on the magnetic strip above my kitchen sink. I might want something capable of more precision, but a chef’s knife, slightly dull, is what I have.

I would start with my stomach and do a long, deep cut down the front of me. The undersides of my upper arms, my thighs: I’d work the knife around my body until I had sculpted something more bearable. I’d bag the discarded meat of me and take it to the trash, then wrap myself in bandages held tight with clips. I imagine how good it would feel to be left only with what is essential, to be so confined that the offense of my body does not move or jiggle or wiggle or transgress its bindings. A punishment, a cleansing, a decisive action taken by me and a knife.

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I go on walks in the cemetery, circling the same path. I walk and look at graves and mausoleums, and I think about what I want done with my body when I die. I usually land on cremation. In movies there’s always a window where you can see inside the cremation chamber, and I picture ghost-me floating there, watching my body burn. I expect to feel pleasure, as I imagine witnessing the source of so much of my pain go up in flames. I want there to be a punishment, because doesn’t it always feel so good to momentarily inflict pain on that which has wronged us? Instead, it all makes me incredibly sad. Devoid of any animating life force my body is just a husk on fire. I know it doesn’t feel pain in this imaginary scenario, because it’s dead. But I still feel an impulse to pull her from the fire, to shield her, to save her. Burn me instead.

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The worst part is not the fantasies, not the violent things I might voluntarily do to myself if I thought I had any chance of survival. It is far worse when those fantasies begin to elicit compassion, because their purpose was to provide a space where I could turn against my body.
I can’t escape to thoughts of knives or fires anymore because when I follow those thoughts to the end I find a tenderness towards my body I am unprepared to maintain. It takes me visualizing my own cremation to find it, but it is there.

Where do you run, when every exit has been sealed? Where do you go, after you ran towards punishment and pain because they were things you understood and instead found benevolence, waiting for you there? I am stuck here with the meat of me I cannot outrun because to do so would be to abandon myself to the knife, to the fire, to a final closing door. 

Have I not already taken up the knife to cleave something deep and irreversible within me? Am I not already a ghost in the cemetery, crying over what had died? 

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Virginia Knight is a writer and fashion historian living in Asheville, North Carolina. Interested in the relationship between fashion and the body, her longform work has appeared in Racked and The Fashion Studies Journal. Find her on Twitter at @virginiak_

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