Growing Up
TRIGGER WARNING: suicide, self-harm
Silence. It pools in the corners like shadows until I can hear my heart throbbing in my chest, a bestial, alien thing pulsing like darkness in the day. Sheets brush against me, their touch unwelcome and distant, like monsters clawing, clawing at my skin, never stopping, clawing, will they never stop clawing at me, crawling on me, all over and under and inside me, crawling all over me until I am drenched in their foul alien feel. There is light, a little. It wavers uncertainly in the darkness, the light of a lonely candle waning with the night. I am dreaming, perhaps.
I stand.
My legs seem to sway in the wind, but there is no wind. My eyes are open. My eyes are closed.
There is a knife. I am staring at it. The floorboards press into my knees, pushing and grinding because they hate me, everybody hates me. Who could ever like me? Who could ever like somebody like me?
I am staring at the knife and my eyes ache with the strain; they are laced with a thousand needles. I am staring, staring and my cheeks are painted with tears, and I am the canvas, I am the artist, I am the wasted work of the painter who washes it all out in the rain because it is not good enough it can never be good enough.
When I was young I would look at the stars and they would look back. I would see something there. I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know what they saw in me. I know nobody else ever saw anything in me.
I don’t know anything any more.
I remember reaching for the stars. Back arced, hand stretching and stretching, toes almost off the ground, always trapped by the gravity grabbing me. I would run and run and run, faster and faster, leaping in the night, beyond caring about what people thought when they saw me, wind flowing about my face, and I thought that if I could just run fast enough I could escape the prison of the earth and fly up, up, up to the stars. One leap, greater and higher than any other, joy and dread and everything in a single moment. Hope. A second where I was surer than I’d ever been about anything in the world that I was going to fly, that I would be free.
Then nothing.
The knife is heavy in my hand. It droops with the weight of it. The tip rests gently against my other palm. It presses so sweetly, the sharp cold emptiness of the metal. All I can smell is smoke, the ashes of candlelight burning me in darkness. All I seek is rest. Sleep will not satisfy; the world wrecks me as I sleep, taunting me with impossible images that fade even as I try to grasp them and though the memory fades the pain remains, it remains, it always remains. I can never be rid of it, I must live like this, trapped in this dismal world of clouds and darkness and sorrow and sadness and nothing. There is nothing here. This world is as empty as the lies of those who run it. It is as empty as my heart. It is as empty as my dream of the stars. I am empty. I am the canvas. I am the dream, the impossible thing, the unwanted thing that fades even as you shout at me. The flame of the candle cups my hand and it is hot, hotter than the world, more real than anything. There is pain, but it is almost comforting. The empty shell burnt away leaving nothing at all, nothing at all, not even memory or thought or comfort.
Who am I? I am nobody.
Who was I? I was everything.
Knife at my wrist, cold and certain, clearer than ice, clearer than air, clear as the stars that plastered the sky. Perhaps I will fly, carried by wings of light, away from this dead world. Perhaps I won’t.
Thud.
The knife rests gently on the tabletop, point digging in as it trembles, throwing light from the candle about like a toddler in a temper tantrum. The candle dies.
My cheeks are cold with tears. My knees push into my stomach, warm and comforting. My heartbeat reverberates through my body, into my head, pulsing through me like dread and hope and sorrow.
Light.
It is the sun.
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