1.You Nut
It’s always been said that dying hurt. The sensation of cold seeping through your veins, tightening of muscles as your body struggles to fight the inevitable. That last rattle of breath escaping your lungs and your hearts giving up on its pitiful pittle-pattle.
They probably weren’t doing it right.
Because as I lay there with the alcohol flowing in my veins, warming my body and making the sharp edges of life a little duller. The tub overflowing with lukewarm water loosening those pesky knots through-out my body, letting me sink a little deeper into that blurry warmth taking over.
I haven’t felt this good in months.
Even when the water swirled with the blood seeping over the edge from a cut along my arm, it turned into a pale pink galaxy, one I will soon join. One where the pain and loneliness will have to take its talons out of me, and finally let me be. The galaxy deepens from pink to red, my eyes droop as the feeling of faded deepens alongside it. And all I can hope is at the end that I will be buried deep in that bloody galaxy as a beautiful star.
3 Months Later
28 water marks, 5 cracks and a spot that looks very alarming like mold.
Counting them over and over again was how I kept my sanity in group therapy. Through all the whining and complaining about the tragedy we called life, those little imperfections became my lame escape.
With the thought of escape the scars on my wrist started to itches, they are neat little twin cuts, down the road, not across the street of course. Slowly I peel back the dingy purple sweater that is passed out to all those who grace the halls of Haven Behavioral Hospital of Philadelphia, keeping my eyes focused above, trying to make sure my little shameful scratching was hidden.
For the shame and disgust is what is pulsing through my body as I dig my nail into those ugly pick scars. Tears start to pool at the corner of my eyes, threatening to fall as the nails follow the path that I had cut, another one of my lame escapes. Just as I finished pushing my nail into them, a throat clearing and words coming at me have me snap my eyes forward and my hands away from my dirty little shame.
“So, what do you think Kay?” It was the doc’s daily attempt to get me to share the oh so horrible thing that made me add those scars as decorations to my body.
Staring into her honey brown eyes, I can see the hope she holds for me, that maybe today is the day I share. The day I tell the group how my parents were murdered for some measly dollars and their wedding rings, how I had to take my SAT’s while I was planning a funeral to bury my family. Or maybe how every night I would get trashed on some cheap vodka and sleep in their bed, so I could feel their warmth one last time. How putting that blade to my skin was the first time in months that the pain that had numbed my heart finally let go.
“Think you might need to fix your ceiling”
4 More Months
“You sure you want it that short?” my roommate asks for the 10th time as she holds a rusty blade, we found outside in one hand and a long chuck of my curly dark brown hair in her other.
Staring in the small bathroom mirror we have to share, my hair cascading down my back with curls flying every which way. The color of my father and the curls of my mother, there is only one thing left to do.
“Chop that shit off”
It took about two hours to work the blade through all my hair and get it to the length that I wanted, a pixie length type cut, it left me no time to shower before my meeting with the doc’s. Standing in front of her frosted doors, I could feel the little snipped ends digging into my back, shuffling my shoulders around hoping to get them out, I open the door and start the one on one therapy that is required if I ever want to leave this place.
“Annddddd that is 10 minutes of total silence” Doc jokes as she looks at the old mickey mouse watch on her wrist “A new record I think”
“Whelp guess I’ve peaked then. Game Over.”
I can hear a light chuckle from her as I pick the lint off of the tan coach I was currently sitting on. At the rate I was picking, with the remaining 50 minutes I could probably have a whole ball of lint made. This ball of lint would be the high light of my day, between craft time and music therapy.
“Well that would be such a shame, since something came for you” I can hear her opening and riffing through some draws. It wasn’t until I hear the soft plop of something landing on her desk before I even bother to look up. Resting on her old wooden desk was a thin canvas, one about the size of a greeting card or birthday card. Leaning forward with my fingers trembling, softly grazing the dried paint I can feel my heart start to race.
“Is that from….?” Grasping the canvas, I can feel the burn at the back of my throat as the urge to cry just overcomes me entirely. My chest starts to feel like a hand has grasped my lungs and is squeezing every last breath from it. Can a person forget how to breath and die?
“She does have a very…umm…interesting imagination”
Every year she would send me a canvas, on my birthday. A birthday I forget I had this year, a birthday I hadn’t planned to be around for. But clearly, she hadn’t forgotten. This year she had painted a female version of the peanut guy, completely with some big old double D’s covered by an orange jumpsuit that ended in barely covering booty shorts. This Miss. Peanut had long flowing brown hair and a face covered in a rainbow birthday cake, written right above her head was ‘Happy Birthday You NUT, Love you’.
Gripping the canvas until my knuckle turn white,until I can’t feel my fingers tips anymore, after 6 months it finally happens. I break. I sob. And finally I talk.
Hello my reader!
