Breaking Chains

I am a marionette doll because of you. My eyes are glazed over and see nothing, my limbs cannot feel, my lips cannot tell anyone that I need help. I am an artificial interpretation on the person I used to be. My words are borrowed from old paragraphs; my expressions are painted on like a beautiful mask. I am forever suspended in midair, held together by a complex system of rusty hooks and wires. The hooks that dig into my flesh make me wince with every tug as I am pulled through the motions of the daily routine: “No, I’m fine, I really mean it”. Lie. Smile. Walk. “Nothing’s wrong, just a headache.” Lie. Go home. Cry. Cut. Puke. Lay awake thinking about him. Toss and turn and consider my nightmares as escape. Roll out of bed. Paint my face on: Beautiful. Repeat.
The strings that pull me around entangled around each other, and the wires rusted into dust, my deadly puppet show is no longer in my control, and my strings hang like heavy chains.
I awake in the middle on the night, exhausted, but thankful for an intermission from my marathon of nightmares. I feel as if I was cut open, filled with stones, and sewn back up in a careless fashion, my stiches lose and uneven. I close my eyes and I see the painful images from my subconscious that seem to have been pasted to the back of my eyelids. I see Beck, my best friend, the way he would want me to remember him. Then, I see Beck, the boy who hung himself in his basement with a dog chain. I panic and open my eyes, not daring to blink. I feel sick from the haunting images, resenting the kid who posted pictures of the scene on the Internet like it was a joke. I drag myself out of bed and rush to the bathroom to flee from the darkness.
I take shelter in the bright florescent light after I lock the door behind me and mentally barricade the door with the lies fed to me like: “It’s not your fault Beck’s dead” and “You and Beck were both victims, don’t blame yourself” so my demons couldn’t follow me in here. Victims: my stomach lurches at the thought of the word. I am only a victim of a condition I brought upon myself. A condition I was tormented about at school when people mocked me by pretending to gag themselves when I walked by or murmuring things like “skeleton” under their breath just for me to hear. One day I passed out in the bathroom after forcing up my lunch and had to be carried out of the school on a gurney, that’s when everyone found out my dirty little secret. Beck was the only person I had left after the rest of my friends decided they didn’t want to be involved with the bulimic girl.
The girl I see in the mirror now is not me anymore. Bulimia and neglect slowly peeled me apart, layer by layer, and now I am torn down to my foundation. I was a nice girl with potential before a parasite crept inside my ribcage and festered, ate away at my heart and spat acid into my lungs more and more with every break up, every lie, and every broken promise. I just wanted acceptance. There’s no meat on my bones, no life in my eyes, or thoughts in my head. On nights like this, I dream of suicide: a bullet through my head leaving no bloody mess. Maybe they could post me on the same webpage as Beck, right next to his picture of him hung up by the neck under a staircase. Or better yet, put us both in a glass box so people can see us for who we are in a beautiful display of our misery: Beck’s blood falling like rain and fragments of my skull glittering under these florescent lights and floating down like snow.
I can’t carry on, especially not without Beck here. I’m emotionless as I open the medicine cabinet and stare at the orange bottles of pills prescribed to me: anti-depressants, sleeping pills, and diet stabilizers. I grab the sleeping pills, dreamily. I sit on the floor and pour the little blue tablets into my hand. I tilt my head back and swallow one. I feel excited because I’m finally going through with this, I would always say “If things aren’t better by next month, I’ll do it” and I always got too afraid.
Well now I’m not afraid. I smile and consume the rest of the blue pills one by one.
I can picture the tablets dissolving in the stomach. There’s no turning back. Series of questions flood to my head: “Will these pills even kill me? Is this what Beck would want? Who will find me first? Should I unlock the door?” I ignore these thoughts when I realize it doesn’t matter. That’s the best part of what I’m doing, I won’t be around to deal with the mess. My mom has probably been expecting this to happen, anyway. Ever since she found out about my bulimia, she just shrugs away my presence away because I am now just a temporary inconvenience to her. No amounts of gagging behind closed doors, weeping under the covers, or even nights in hospital beds are ever enough to make her notice. I am just a ghost to her; an ugly smear on a family portrait.
I start to feel weightless, but yet I hit the floor, limp like a ragdoll. Something unravels inside me. A stich comes undone; I feel the threads slowly release their grip from my mutilated organs. The numbness I feel now makes me remember my first hospital visit: flashes of bright lights and Beck’s worried expressions and sad eyes. The clumps of my hair that fell out when Beck tried to hold my hair back as I puked into the stainless steel dish; a nurse had to hold the dish in place on my lap because it couldn’t balance on my boney thighs that were thinner than my knees. The smell of latex and fingernail polish that filled my nostrils as the nurse just looked at me and shook her head while I fell apart in Beck’s arms that night. She knew I didn’t deserve help, I was a lost cause. Just let my hair fall out of my scalp and my skin peel off of my bones until I am a mere pile of ashes that could simply be washed away by the rain. I could have made peace with that fate. No hospital bills in the mail for my mom and no emotional turmoil for Beck.
I felt a surge of tingles down my spine, then complete lack of feeling. My vision blurs and I cannot tell if I’m breathing or if my heart is beating anymore. I focus all my energy on sitting up and propping myself against the wall, not sure what to do with my arms which feel limp and unnatural at my side. But at least I won’t look like the ragdoll that I am when they find me. As if some pretty little girl got tired of playing with me then threw me down and I remained mangled on the floor in the same position that I landed.
“Maybe I should have written a note…” I think, as I drift even further from reality. But I have no idea what it would say anyway. Would I list reasons why I’m doing this? But the question you ask yourself when contemplating suicide isn’t “Why?” but “What not?” Then you fight with yourself and usually talk yourself out of it, until one day you run out of reasons to change your mind. I’m still shocked that Beck ran out of reasons before me. I always thought that he would survive longer since he could compare himself to me, and he could realize he was nowhere near as pathetic as me: a girl with a rich family who lives in a neighborhood other people dream of living in, and I shattered so easily despite it all.
As the numbness turns into feeling freezing cold, I sit in agony and wait for something beautiful to take me somewhere else. Maybe I’ll just drift away aimlessly into the silent black abyss that is the space between the stars, leaving my torments behind, or maybe I will be forced to watch the aftermath of my selfish act of self-destruction, a demon standing behind me, holding my eyes open and shouting, “Look what you did!”
I feel more stitches unravel inside me. My ribcage seems to cave in and the fragile ash outline of my heart finally crumbles to dust, floating out of me and drifting into space. My final memories float away with the ashes of my heart and I close my eyes and say goodbye one last time. I’m ready to sleep forever as I become free from the pain at last.