Rev

The person in the transcription is describing their decision to amputate their arm in order to avoid a slow death. They explain the process of cutting through their forearm and identifying different tissues and bones. They feel excitement about soon being free of their dead limb. They are careful not to cut the arteries until the end. They repeat the process of sorting, pinching, rotating, and slicing through the muscles. 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 emotion, knowing the alternative is to wait for a progressively more certain, but a shrewdly slow demise. I choose to meet the risk of death in action. As surreal as it looks for my arm to disappear into a glove of sandstone, it feels gloriously perfect to have figured out how to amputate it. My first act is to severe, with a downward sawing motion, as much of the skin on the inside surface of my forearm as I can, without tearing any of the noodle-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 stow 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 head. It's just a matter of time. Prodding and pinching, I can distinguish between the hard tendons and ligaments, and the soft, of the more pliable arteries. I should avoid cutting the arteries until the end, if I can even 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 a blade like a parting knife, I slice through a pinky-finger-sized filament. I repeat the action a dozen times, slipping the knife through the string after string of muscle without hesitation or sound. Sort, pinch, rotate, slice. Sort, pinch, rotate, slice. Patterns. Process.