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The person is describing their decision to amputate their own arm as a way to escape a slow death. They carefully explore the inner features of their arm, feeling the muscles, bones, tendons, and arteries. They decide to avoid cutting the arteries until the end and begin slicing through the muscles to amputate their arm. They repeat this process multiple times. I leave behind my prior declarations, that severing my arm is nothing but a slow act of suicide, and move forward on a crescent wave of emotions. Knowing the alternative is to wait for a progressively more stern, but assuredly still demise, I choose to meet the risk of death in action, as surreal as it looks for my arm to disappear into a globe of sandstone, it feels gloriously perfect to have figured out how to amputate it. My first act is to disappear, with a downward thawing motion, as much of the skin on the inside surface of my forearm as I can, without tearing any of the nodal-like veins so close to the skin. Once I've opened a large enough hole in my arm, about four inches below my wrist, I momentarily stall the knife, holding its handle in my teeth, and poke first my left forefinger, and then my left thumb inside my arm, and feel around. Sorting through the bizarre and unfamiliar textures, I make a mental map of my arm's inner features. I feel bundles of muscle fibers, and working my fingers behind them, find two pairs of cleanly fractured but jagged bone ends, twisting my right forearm as if to turn my trapped palm down. I feel the proximal bone ends rotate freely around their fixed partners. It's a painful movement, but at the same time, it's a motion I haven't made since Saturday, and it excites me to know that soon I will be free of the rest of my crushed, dead hand. It's just a matter of time. Prodding and pinching, I can distinguish between the hard tendons and ligaments, and the soft, rubbery feel of the more pliable arteries. I should avoid cutting the arteries until the end if I can help it at all, I decide. Withdrawing my bloody fingers to the edge of my incision point, I isolate a strand of muscle between the knife and my thumb, and using the blade like a paring knife, I slice through a pinky-finger-sized filament. I repeat the action a dozen times, flipping the knife through the string after string of muscle without hesitation or sound. Soar, pinch, rotate, slice. Soar, pinch, rotate, slice. Pattern. Process.