This Time

    The house was silent. The old cuckoo clock my best friend had given our family softly ticked in the corner, leaning precariously on the tipsy table. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. My parents were at work, but even if they had been here, few more sounds would have been audible. For days, my parents had stayed glued to their stations: my dad sedentary in front of the fuzzy TV screen, my mom in her room, praying, weeping, ignoring the trays of food I placed by her locked door. My parents moved like zombies, rarely getting up, only leaving each morning to work with blank faces, returning in the evening with the same unreadable mask. It was neglect to me, and neglect to their own selves.

    That week, my dinner consisted of burnt toast, tap water, and anything else I could find from rooting through the refrigerator. I was alone. That meant nobody to talk to, nobody to ask, “How was your day, sweetie?” Of course, not like the answer would matter. Ever since the attack, life has been hell. I wake up in the morning to brace myself for the taunts, the whispers, the hate spewed on me at school. The boys waiting for me around the corner, ready to pounce. Even the wary looks of the teachers, the racist, naive comments. Two days in a row, I have slunk in through the door, bruises blossoming on my face, my arms, my skinny shoulders. My parents have not seen, because they have not seen anything. Their eyes are empty, drained of happiness, love, emotion. Since the bombing, that is all we have felt.

    I lean my head on the doorway, tired, ready to sink down to the tattered carpet. I stare into my hands, then to the maze of blue veins on my wrist. I make a new design with my finger, a few clear lines. The idea looming in the back of my mind creeps forward once again. Life would be so much easier to be an object, or a free creature. But lately, things have gotten so bad, I wonder...would no life be easiest of all? My backpack drops to the floor with a thud, and I absently wander into my parents’ bathroom, fingering the razor lying on the edge of the cracked sink. I walk to my room, razor in hand, still lost in another world. Maybe this would be a better solution, a final happy place.

    I lock my bathroom door, and crank the hot water in the cramped shower. Stripping off my clothes, I ignore the cuts and bruises adorning my skin. Steam rises and clouds the tiny, broken mirror propped up against the sink. I climb in the scalding stream of water, then quickly add cold to balance it out. I fold myself up into the tiny tiled shower, my hands still clamped desperately onto the plastic razor. Slowly, I relax into the swirling water, my eyes anxiously shifting, from the stained water rings on the sides of the ceramic bathtub, to the dust caking the wall in the corner of the ceiling.

    The veins in my wrist throbbed, the faint blue lines seeming to push to the surface. I ignored the uncomfortable feeling rising up, up, like the water. Over, over my legs, arms, neck. I brought the razor to my wrist, and slowly pushed it across. Nothing happened. Then I felt the sting, the sharp pain of the clear line. The blood surfaced, and a trickle of diluted, watery red seeped into the elaborate pattern of my skin. I cut again, and again, each slice deeper, more bloody, but less painful. I ignored everything around me, the sound of the front door opening, the buzz of the TV, the sounds distant and lost in another world. Cut, cut. Cut, cut. The silent chant pulsed in my brain. More blood. Swirling down the drain, around my feet, it kept coming. Cut, cut. The water turned darker... darker.

I started to lose focus. The straight red lines on my skin turned wavy. The peeling paint on the yellow wall turned gray. What? What? I started feeling sick. Pain shot up my arm. From my wrist, through my shoulders. Pain, pain. Suddenly, the bathroom was spinning. Waves of panic hit me. Boom! The razor left my hands. I groped around for the sides of the walls, desperately looking for something to hold on to. Fuzzy blackness crept into my vision. I couldn’t see. My head was pounding, and my world was black. I felt the nausea rising, up, up. The water was falling down, down, down.

    The next thing I knew, the shower was gone. I was on the ground. The sound of the shower behind me, beating the tile. The dim light, flickering on, off. On, off. The room was still in circles, then up, down. Up, down. The cooled drops of water slid down my back, dripping, dripping.

I don’t know how long I lay on the hard, dirty floor, how long it took for the water to turn to cold drops, forcing my body into jerking shivers. How long it took for my tears to become part of the small pool of blood an water now surrounding me. The rain of the shower lulled me to my dark sleep. No more, I told myself. Not this time. Not this time.