Part i

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Little red balloons, strung together by rainbow streamers, fly in the awakening sky. Lady bugs kiss the noses of little girls, as their tongues flicker out to catch the last droplets of icecream from their icecream cone. Happy couples stroll about in the city, holding hands, laughing amongst themselves; for the sake of simply smiling, not for the sake of laughter. Pedestrians whistle as they gait by, walking with plastic bags swinging from their arms lazily. City lights, beaming lights that are joyous, jovial and blinding blink in the evening sun. Pinks and blues and yellows and bright whites.

A happy world.

A world that was long gone –

gone.

It’s a muted memory in the back of his mind.; one that he recollects starkly and yet distantly, as if observing a numbed limb – he is not a part of that world anymore.

He reeks of a metallic scent.

There’s blood on his shower walls again. Blood and semen and scrapes of his skin gather at the shower’s drain.

It is night, and the rain is coming down heavily – an oncoming thunderstorm, with little lightening and mostly fat droplets of rain. They bang furiously against his house and against the outer walls of his bathroom, shaking him to his core. The wind howls like an agonizing song, the kind he never wants to hear because it reminds him too much of himself.

He has torn up his arm and chest again with his box cutter and his razors and his pieces of shattered glass.

There is blood all over him, mostly. He admires his wounds like a tiger might admire its stripes. They’re thick and deep and red. He has both slender cuts and thick ones, short ones and long ones, ones bone deep and others light and shallow. They rip across his stomach, over his chest, around his shoulders and on his arms. Sometimes in a neat stack, other times in sporadic and crisscrossing lines, sometimes cross hatches, other times bended craftily to form pained, half-finished words.

His arms are the worst. His right arm, specifically. So painted in blood is it that the wounds are barely discernable beyond the heavy liquid. It drips, drips and drops to the bottom of the shower floor and the blood rolls away like scattered, pretty little gems escaping his grasp.

He closes his eyes, eyelashes fluttering down like a butterfly’s wings, and brings his wrist to his lips. It’s a new wound, freshly cut like freshly sliced meat, and he appreciates it for what it is. Warm, gushing blood oozes from inside him and paints his lips like an expensive lipstick. It’s thick and intoxicating, like an antiquated wine, yet far more precious. He inhales harshly and smears it amicably around his face, painting himself – his paint brushes are his knives and his body is his canvas and his blood is his paint. He loves the smell of his paint, the rich color, the warmth it contains, like oil, and the way it covers up his skin and the way its exposure physically burns him.

He wants to rip himself into void. Into oblivion.

He trembles. Loss of blood makes his brain tilt dangerously on its hilt.

He exhales pleasantly as a comfortable heat envelopes him with the sudden, dizzying exhaustion. It shrouds his mind, dulls his vision and weakens his senses drastically, like a hard hospital drug. His naked chest rises and falls sharply with his every breath, and his heart races and strains inside him. His wrists and ankles have become slender and mauve bracelets have formed around them with his severe blood loss. He’s naked, and his knees clatter together like rocks and he shrivels into a ball, shivering from the abrupt cold prickling at his drained immune system.

He’s at his happiest this way, and yet he doesn’t smile – he’s far too tired, and he thinks, he might have forgotten how to.

His backbone pops from beneath his skin like a linked chain. A lot of his bones are clearly visible because he can’t be bothered with nonsense such as food and other necessities. He crosses his arms over one another and clings onto his shoulders, and closes his eyes, rocking back and forth, humming in the back of his throat as his wounds ache and burn like pits of molten fire.

He shudders once more – the glacier in his mind is slipping, slipping off its mountain range; it’s a beautiful hysteria of white and smoke and dust with thousands of pounds of compressed rock meshed into one cold explosion, and he is falling, falling with gravity as the snow gathers together and the rock rolls downwards. He lies on his side on the shower floor, shivering feebly, breathing tightly through clenched teeth as he digs numbed hands into his hair – he can hardly feel his fingers now. Too much. Too much this time – too much – I – it wasn’t a miscalculation on his part, but a blinding, senseless desire that had caused him a moment of foolishness. He doesn’t regret it, but is simply aware of the oncoming consequences.

He can’t move his legs, and his fingers feel fat and heavy, the texture of his hair is a very mute sensation, one that he can hardly discern. His eyes are glazed over, half lidded, watery and red and yet lacking luster, and his bathroom is disintegrating away into a murmur.

He tries to grasp over his senses – even when knowing such an act is useless – as his body begins to shut down on him; he’s over extinguished and painfully fatigued, and the world spirals like water gathering around a drain, slow and steady. Tiring. Exhausting.

Sleep, his brain whispers as he closes his eyes. His body is too tired to continue shaking. He curls up further, like a wilting flower. For now I’ll… I’ll just – his brain is as warm as a hot tub, and he is having difficulty carrying on any thoughts while in such a state, in such abrupt warmth. Sleep…

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