break

{ memories of you }

Stop. I’m drunk in a bar. It’s nighttime in the city, and I am sitting here, alone. Watching the cars speed by. The pedestrians and their loud laughter, their blissful existence. It’s a blur of light and my glasses are fogging up. That could be the alcohol. My phone rings.

I know who it is. Thank you best friend, thank you for worrying about me. I want to say it but it sounds trite, the words will trip off the tip of my tongue, my inebriated mind unable to properly process the motorized movements required to form the syllables. I answer. I tell him where I am. I can’t tell if he’s angry, upset or frustrated. Maybe he’s frustrated because I keep doing this, disappearing in the middle of the day to drink until alcohol replaces all the blood in my veins. My tolerance is going up. It’s getting harder to reach oblivion.

He arrives, worried. I’m 40 minutes away from home and he doesn’t trust me. I’m 17 and god knows how much alcohol is in my system. Doesn’t trust me to make it to the LRT, to hail a cab and head home. He makes a split second decision.

He comes home with me, waits with me until I sober up and I start to come down. My brain is filled with voices, memories, all these things bouncing around the inside of my head and it’s painful and I hate it. I hate myself more.

He helps me clean all the self-inflicted cuts up and down my arms — vertical, not horizontal. I want to die. There’s smashed glass in the bathroom from where I hurled fragile, delicate ornaments in despair against my own reflection. I’ve left curved half-moon grooves in my own skin, from curling hands into fists, from everything.

I think I’m going crazy.

{ where is my mind }

Hard liquor burns going down, harsh bitter taste on the back of your tongue. It takes everything I have to choke it down, to force it down because I’m not looking to enjoy getting drunk. I’m on a one way trip to a personal purgatory, a brief respite before I’m dragged kicking and screaming back to remembering.

I don’t go to class. Going to class means seeing you, and that means facing up to the reality that you’re there and you’re fine and I’m not. I hear you’re seeing someone new. I’m not fine and I spend my days holed up in my best friend’s apartment, staring at walls. He reaches out to me, I flinch away. Human contact hurts, and he can’t do anything but watch me spiral downwards.

I can’t get you out of my head, whore, slut, how could you fucking do this to me, you desperate little girl, you deserved all of it — fuck it. I sit in his air-conditioned room and make small talk with his housemates, smoke cigarettes out the bedroom window until my face is almost constantly obscured like a fortune-telling mystic. I debate on having another pull of vodka. Half a bottle left.

He tries to feed me. I can’t keep it down.

I sit in corners and talk too much, too fast. I’m running on caffeine. I’m dependent. I can’t fall asleep. I curl deeper into blankets and books, afraid to sleep. I read Dante to him. He watches me as I tear my poetry into pieces and set everything ablaze one day. Some kind of strange pagan ritual to my former self, ding dong the witch is dead. I paint the walls shades of blood red and black when he asks me to paint the room. I tell him I want to die.

One day — I don’t know when it was, exactly. The days melt into one another and everything is dulled down. I don’t remember much of it. I He tells me I stopped breathing, my eyes shut and I just stopped replying. I wake up to his tears and guilt eats away at me, another person hurt because of my actions. All my fault. Always my fault. He cries over my new scabs and old bruises. I cry because nothing is alright.

Everything is falling apart.