Misery

Trembling, she slowly opened her red-rimmed eyes to the hot spray of water coming from the silver showerhead above her seated form. Hugging her knees, she heaved a shaky sigh and rested her head back against the tiled wall, trying to purge the cocktail of sadness that had so far bought her nothing but tears.

The water sounded like darts on the bottom of the shower, or heavy rain on pavement. It spiralled down the drain like a tornado. Above and beyond her cleansing, the unforgiving white light emitting from the bathrooms fluorescent tubes paled her arms to the dullest white.

All apart from the angry red scars, marring her upper arms like angular lines on a roadmap. These were self inflicted, a protest of sorts to the shame of being alive. They ran both horizontally and vertically, depending on her whims at their time of creation. Her heavy blond hair, coloured dark by the water, clung to her back and shoulders, dripping to the floor to join the tumult of water flooding down the drain.

Those red-rimmed eyes, usually a deep cobalt or sapphire, were drain to a pale blue-grey by the harsh lighting and tears. She looked down; eyes closed again, her emotions fighting it out between sadness, anger, betrayal and apathy. For, she in the end cared not for her own life, nor the lives of others.

Her misery belonged to her. It was as much her possession as it was her emotions. It was the thing that drew her lovers like moths to the flame, a mystery and inner despair they wished to absolve. But the wretchedness inside of her eventually drove her partners away, as they found their love was nothing more to her than a bandage was to an amputation.

Long ago, she had lost something. And gained this misery in its place. What she was now was nothing compared to the child she once was, the one who would smile and shriek with joyous laughter. She never realised how much pain she felt until it extracted itself from her body through waves of blood from self-opened wounds.

It was pitiful, she knew. She was pitiful. However, pity had given what love and care had not; a house, a job, enough food and money to live on and something that was purely hers. Her sorrow and self-mourning. Her ‘friends’ were nothing more than those vessels who felt no attraction beyond a wish to rescues the unreachable. And to help her escape the unescapable.

Some nights, she let it all go. Painting a mask of mascara, lipstick, fake smiles and mocking eyes, she would exit her tomb of a home to find somewhere where the poisonous fluid of man would make her forget everything and regret nothing, at least for a few hours. The louder the music, the happier the people around her, the drunker she wished to get, until more often than not she was accompanied home by a stranger who would hold her hair back as she retched over the porcelain throne. Then, they would give her mouthwash enough to mask the taste before plundering her body, helping her find a temporary false release from the empty hollow that had held her for so long.

She looked up again, fresh tears welling in the washed away colour of her irises. They slipped away from her, mingling with the shower water until they joined the millions of droplets in the drainpipe below. Looking at the cold cruel ceiling, she begged for absolution, forgiveness. The ability to break free of the numb emptiness that mercilessly pillaged her for so many years.

The cold white of the ceiling remained as silent as a grave. She half sobbed, half laughed at her foolishness. Her misery was all she had left at the end of the day. Everything else was not sufficient enough to provide her with her inner dark flame that had been holding her life together while destroying her soul for so long. She did not wish to die, oh no, for death was the final end and judgement and she feared that as she feared life.

She was stuck in a self-made purgatory of misery, between a life she never wanted and a death she wouldn’t face. Once more looking up at the showerhead, her hands crept up her arms to run gently along her markings. Weeping so quietly she was unaware of her sobs, she began to rock, backwards and forwards, as gently as golden hay in a field.

If you looked close enough in her poor desolate eyes, you could see the cracks appearing. You could see that this woman was breaking. Her fragility, akin to a porcelain doll that never said a thing, was shattering under the water falling like a star storm from the sky. Who’d be misery, a small part of her wondered. The answer stared her in the faces as bold as a matador facing a dying bull.

She was it. She was misery.