The Major Lift. Rewrite one.

Relief in Suffering.

Aurora had not slept, but found herself on campus in some sort of autopilot mode in one of the arts building bathrooms, struggling to keep calm. It was ridiculously early, and the campus building had only just been opened. She sat on the bench that lined one of the walls of the cavernous, echoey room. The motion-sensing lights had turned off long since she'd entered and she sat enshrouded in the shadows and her overcoat. Her elbows leant on her knees and the silver razorblade hovered over her left arm in a shaking right hand. The skin was already marked up like the pages of a school novel. What difference would one or a few more lines make?
She dragged the corner of the blade into the skin near the ball of her left hand. She brought it upward, under just the right amount of pressure. Pain followed in its wake as bright blood filled in the crevice, running down the palm of her hand in ribbons and dripping slowly to the beige floor. She closed her eyes and leaned back, taking a few deep breaths and feeling the adrenaline soak her body like a warm bath. The rush unlike any she'd experienced before took over the higher functions and numbed her like a sedative.
Everyone has their limits, the edges of their capacity for hurt and stress. Auroras had been shattered. The place she'd called home to date had become about as safe as a minefield. Aurora was no stranger to maladaptation, no stranger to impulsivity, even she knew this. But throughout her adolescence and what little of adulthood she'd experienced, the one and only modulation for this kind of pain was to transfer it from her head to her skin. She had no idea if any other people on the planet shared this experience with her but she guessed long before then that it was more common than most think.
Leaning on the cold tiles of the bathroom wall, she brought her knees swinging up to rest on the bench ahead of her, letting her now lacerated left arm hang off the bench beside her. She tried to disappear into the corner of the alcove, to fade into the tiling and be lost to the world. She wished she had the ability to dissolve like an effervescent tablet.
Blinking and letting tears roll freely down her face, she sniffed hard against the congestion that threatened to obscure her breathing. Under the surface of endorphin-soaked calm, nausea ebbed at the high cliffs of her consciousness. While she savoured the temporary quiet and calm, the bleeding slowed to a steady drip. Her arm felt numb, the fingertips had begun tingling painfully. The tingling spreading up her arm like some horrible slow creeping cancer.
Time faded away to the very edge of Auroras senses she really wasn't sure how much time had passed. The bleeding had all but stopped and as horrifying awareness of what she'd done began to crash over her where she sat glued to the wall.
She suddenly hauled herself up and stumbled over to the toilet stalls. The lights snapped back on as she moved and within moments she'd shoved her head into the bowl and heaved. A torrent of noxious bile hit the water and the smell billowed upward, hitting her in the face and causing yet another wave of nausea. She heaved again, lamenting bitterly the fact that she was not vomiting quietly. Coughing and spluttering  into the mess, she tried to breath though the smarting pain in her arm and the twisting cramping in her abdomen. She brought her bad arm up to cradle her head at the rim of the bowl, bring her nose and mouth upward and breathing in the slightly fresher air. Her breathing was too fast, as though she'd just run a twelve minute mile. Her own chest fighting against the binder and against the sting of yet more bile at the back of her throat for air. She coughed, hoping to shift the itch and spluttered as another stream of it fell out of her mouth. Her own gag reflex triggered, she heaved again, repeating the horrible cycle.
The numbness in her left arm had faded now, to be replaced with a throbbing that repeated itself in her head and her stomach. Blood now smeared the rim of the toilet from the wound.
Regret surged up her chest along with yet more vomit. It seared through her mind and made liquid out of her limbs. The magnitude of this episode was only just hitting her, right where it hurt most. She could have stepped out of her wrenched body into the abyss of the external world and observed her pathetic visage grovel at the porcelain alter searching fruitlessly for relief from the pain she had no one but herself to thank for.
Loathing followed. Evil, sickening loathing for the body she inhabited and for the way it made others read her, for what the consciousness that controlled it had done to its flesh. Hatred, to which Aurora was no stranger directed inward at the heart that thundered in the empty chest.
There was no way she was making it to class that day. No way she was making it out of that stall any time soon.