From the very beginning, the piece does not ask for permission to enter your psyche; it demands entry, slashing through preconceived notions with the surgical precision of a scalpel wielded by a surgeon who has forgotten the Hippocratic oath. There is no comfort here, no soft landings. Abundant Blessings insists that the reader feel every jagged edge, every blistering turn of phrase, every fractured moment of clarity as if they were their own.
The author’s approach is reminiscent of Joan Didion's cold, calculated precision in works like The White Album—but where Didion observes the unraveling with a journalist's eye, this piece participates in it. It dives headlong into the chaos, not to make sense of it, but to become one with it, much like Burroughs did in Naked Lunch. The narrative cuts between moments of brutal honesty and surreal abstraction, blending the real and the imagined until they are indistinguishable from one another. This is not an accident; this is the method of the razor.
Each blessing, each moment of respite that the narrative offers, is razor-thin—fleeting moments that shimmer before they are sliced away, leaving nothing but the scar tissue of experience. The blessings themselves, in their abundance, become burdens. They are layered, one upon another, in such quick succession that the reader is left with a sense of vertigo, unsure of where one ends and the next begins. And that, perhaps, is the point: there are no clean breaks, no moments of true resolution in this world. The razor doesn't just cut; it rends, it tears, it exposes the blood and sinew beneath.
The style, too, reflects this razor-sharp approach. The prose is fast, unforgiving, often switching perspectives and voices without warning. It's a dance of blades, a ballet of cuts that slices through the conventions of narrative form. One moment, the reader is in the head of the protagonist, feeling the sting of the razor against their skin; the next, they are floating above it all, watching the blood pool on the floor. This disorienting effect serves to heighten the emotional intensity, keeping the reader off-balance, on edge.
But for all its brutality, Abundant Blessings is not without purpose. The razor's cuts are not wanton; they are deliberate, each slice revealing something about the human condition that we would rather leave hidden. In its violence, there is a strange tenderness—a recognition of the fragility of the human soul, and a desire to lay it bare, to expose it to the light, however harsh that light may be.
At its core, this piece is about survival. Not just the survival of the body, but the survival of the soul in a world that seems determined to break it down, to strip it of its dignity, its sense of self. It is about the resilience of the human spirit, even in the face of overwhelming odds, even when the blessings themselves become blades.
Abundant Blessings is not an easy read. It is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of the reader. But for those willing to pick it up, to face the razor’s edge, there is a strange beauty to be found in its cuts. It is a beauty born of pain, of survival, of the recognition that even in the most brutal moments, there is a certain grace to be found. The grace of endurance. The grace of persistence. The grace of living, even when the world seems determined to make it otherwise.
In the end, the razor does not just cut; it carves out space for something new, something raw and real and vital. It leaves the reader marked, scarred, changed in ways that are difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore. And perhaps that is the greatest blessing of all.