A sort of mirror reflection on what I've been through the past couple of years.
Belying her calm voice and sunny expressions at school and at home, the fourteen-year-old girl who now squatted in her second-floor bathroom was most certainly not alright. The bottle of sleeping pills in her quivering hand always seemed like such a dangerous thing, such a delicate weapon – in many ways, it resembled botulin toxin; in small amounts, it was harmless, and even bettered your life and appearance in a sense. However, take too much, it crawled through your throat, through your veins, infecting every inch of you like a creeping black plague until it inevitably strangled you.
Her parents were fighting again. Ever since her father had had the affair, her life had gone from very comfortable and secure, to a shredded mess of alcohol, betrayal, lying and desperate pleading for her mother, to please, please she sobbed, screamed, inside herself, stop drinking. Her father . . . what a disaster. She didn’t care about him anymore. That man whom she was born from might as well have been dead. It was almost surreal in a sense.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to shout, to cry, to ... for the love of God, to do something. Anything. But she was merely a husk of what she used to be, bottling up her emotions until she suffocated them completely, as if all the alcohol her mother slugged down every night and every night her father had begged her and begged her to forgive him for what he did, had hollowed her out from the inside.
Her thoughts drifted to her sister, her brothers. Matt and Pat were off to college, and Katie was too young to understand all of this.
She whispered a silent prayer and ran her finger over the black lettering of the label before popping open the cap and emptying out it’s contents into her blood-stained palm, which had been saturated many nights before this one with the crimson evidence she needed to spill to know that she was still a living, breathing person.
As she slipped one pill after another into her mouth, swallowing each one with great care, and even as she crawled behind the shower curtain and into the tub so perhaps, just perhaps, her sister wouldn’t find her first in the morning, she wondered still what fate awaited after her fell asleep for the last time.
Belying her calm voice and sunny expressions at school and at home, the fourteen-year-old girl who now squatted in her second-floor bathroom was most certainly not alright. The bottle of sleeping pills in her quivering hand always seemed like such a dangerous thing, such a delicate weapon – in many ways, it resembled botulin toxin; in small amounts, it was harmless, and even bettered your life and appearance in a sense. However, take too much, it crawled through your throat, through your veins, infecting every inch of you like a creeping black plague until it inevitably strangled you.
Her parents were fighting again. Ever since her father had had the affair, her life had gone from very comfortable and secure, to a shredded mess of alcohol, betrayal, lying and desperate pleading for her mother, to please, please she sobbed, screamed, inside herself, stop drinking. Her father . . . what a disaster. She didn’t care about him anymore. That man whom she was born from might as well have been dead. It was almost surreal in a sense.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to shout, to cry, to ... for the love of God, to do something. Anything. But she was merely a husk of what she used to be, bottling up her emotions until she suffocated them completely, as if all the alcohol her mother slugged down every night and every night her father had begged her and begged her to forgive him for what he did, had hollowed her out from the inside.
Her thoughts drifted to her sister, her brothers. Matt and Pat were off to college, and Katie was too young to understand all of this.
She whispered a silent prayer and ran her finger over the black lettering of the label before popping open the cap and emptying out it’s contents into her blood-stained palm, which had been saturated many nights before this one with the crimson evidence she needed to spill to know that she was still a living, breathing person.
As she slipped one pill after another into her mouth, swallowing each one with great care, and even as she crawled behind the shower curtain and into the tub so perhaps, just perhaps, her sister wouldn’t find her first in the morning, she wondered still what fate awaited after her fell asleep for the last time.