I can't remember the first time that I touched myself, but I can remember the first time that I began to question the behavior. I can remember running my fingers along my flesh and thinking that this was the reason I had been thrown away. This thing that I was grasping was what had made me unwanted.

I remember feeling angry about it for the first time—angry because it felt good. How could this simple part of me be wrong? This organ was something which I ought to associate with pleasure. Pleasure, then, had resulted in my abandonment.

Perhaps I should have felt pride at what had freed me from that horrid island in the sky, but I could not. I could not be reasonable. It is always a bad idea to think too much, and yet I could not bring myself to stop.

Eventually, thinking brought me to action, as it always tends to do.

At first, I simply squeezed too hard - a mild discomfort. Although I was young, many of my experiences up to that point had been unpleasant, and so I found this one to be more than tolerable. But I was not in the mood for that. This was not something which I deserved to tolerate. Toleration I would not allow.

I began to hurt myself.

It was nothing. Just a nick or scratch here and there. My finger had slipped, I could have told someone who asked. A lapse in coordination had brought that scrape into existence, I could have said, had anyone cared. But they didn't, because they didn't know, because no one could know and there was no one to know, anyway. It was my secret, and I liked it that way. It was something to wrap around myself when the world became too quiet, logic to feed my hungry mind whenever something went wrong—that thing, tucked away beneath my pants and my cloak, that was the reason why.

I remember going too far.

I remember sleeping outside in the cold, wet grass, the sounds of night punctuated by the sounds of fucking inside the cave.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I remember being jealous of the bandits because they could fuck and make noises like that whenever they wanted to. The most I was capable of was doing things to myself, though when I did, all that I wanted to do was scream at the sheer agony of it. I could not imagine doing those things with someone else, and I did not want to.

One evening, when my time with them was nearly through, one of the bandits brought me a demon girl. She had brown eyes and rumpled hair, and soft ears atop her head. I suppose he wished her to lay with me. Whenever she looked at me, her eyes glistened in a peculiarly docile way.

She smelled of other males. Perhaps she did not realize, but it was nearly overwhelming to me.

I remember desiring companionship. A part of me wished nothing more than to hold her, to be held by someone else, but I knew as she approached me that I would not be allowed so simple a comfort. Why should I bother to desire it? The moment she put her hands on me, it took all of my willpower to suppress the urge to slice them off her arms. The threats which spilled from my mouth slid off of her soft skin like rainwater over feathers of a bird. It probably made her want to fuck even more, and in a way, I could not blame her for that.

I remember running away. I remember leaving her there and returning the next morning to find her in another's embrace. The time in between I spent trying to escape—successfully from them, unsuccessfully from myself.

I remember feeling lonely and confused. I remember thinking that the only reason I existed was because two people had fucked, and maybe it had meant as little to them as it meant to everyone else. I was here because nothing meant anything. I was hurting, drowning in a seemingly unending sea of my own inner turmoil, and the only thing I could possibly know to do was create more pain.

I remember pulling violently at myself. I remember wanting to tear it off. I remember being blinded by rage at even having it there to begin with. I remember it being too dark to see the moisture when I withdrew my hand, and I remember the warm wetness that seeped through my pants while I failed to sleep.

For days after, I pretended—mostly for my own benefit—that nothing had happened. It didn't matter, anyway. The soreness when I walked, the stinging sensation when I bathed, the blood when I urinated—those were all temporary. Weeks later, by the time I had left to find the place of my birth, all of my injuries had healed—all except the ones deep inside, for which I had yet to find cures.