Blood Stained

Trigger warning: suicide, rape, abuse

You broke me into a million pieces,

and I bled, 

I bled a red river into the night.

-       Willowambrosia

I let his fingertips print patterns on my skin, patterns I wish weren’t tattooed so deep into me still. If tears could tear apart the web of those memories, those days spent in immobilizing emptiness, I could imagine letting the warmth of the sun beneath my stubborn shell again. Instead, I am trapped in a misery only few are blessed enough to escape. *Diary entry*

*

The pouring rain had covered me in shivers and the warmth I felt as I found my way into dry clothing was palpable. The library wasn’t far, but the building storm had a mind of its own that night. As I poured boiling water into my favourite glass teacup, prepairing to taste the sweet, honey tainted, chamomile I so desperately missed, I heard the backdoor pushed open slowly. Fear clung to my lungs and suddenly the shivers were back. I turned my body towards the sound, my fingers hovering towards the smallest, most unnoticable fruit knife. 

“Eli?” What…” Before a moment could pass by a blindfold stripped me of my vision, hands pushed against one another. 

“Shh… Don’t be afraid.” A whisper with a flare of determination and breathlessness. 

I was afraid, afraid of what my friend had turned into, afraid of not surviving the plans I heard in his unspoken words. Afraid a storm would take place inside me leaving nothing in its wake. 

“What, why are you doing this?” A thousand questions I knew the answers to ran through me. Answers to questions I wished didn’t exist. 

“You know why, I have always only wanted you.” 

My feet began to rush to where I estimated the back door being, but I got as far as three steps before he grabbed my throat. I knew he would, my mind could not stretch far enough to find a way out. My sheets were soft against the skin, but I abandoned them in an effort to negotiate. 

“Where do you think you’re going? Lay down.” I could feel the smirk on his face, he knew I couldn’t get away.

“Why?” A whisper compressed with pain, served as sharply as I could. 

“Because I said so.” A stone wall. An opposite to someone who I once cared for, who once was a friend. 

*

Torn apart, piece by piece, like a worn-out toy that was no longer loved. Each breath like dust carving a path through my lungs, slowly but surely my soul pulled aside from flesh. Words making their way through my ears, my mind unable to catch a single syllable. I had decided to leave, to let my body survive on its own if it could, until his voice pulled me back. 

Louder than the thunder above our bodies mingled in misery he mumbled into my ear “I will never forget tonight, and neither will you.”

The crash of suddenly being present for his climax jarred me into momentary awareness of my own body, of my being. My skin was being turned into a graveyard with no flowers to show I was missed, to make the loss seem bearable, there was nothing bearable about this. I tasted blood as my hands restored my vision. He was gone. 

*

Silence, everything in the world was silent. Sounds of the storm raging outside disappeared a long time ago, leaving behind an immobile emptiness. Time had vanished, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, I could have been sitting there for a week and it would have been all the same to me, I wouldn’t have known. When I snapped out of it finally, the sun had formed rainbows on my skin, as if I could ever see colors again, see anything but darkness. For the first time the morning sun, a dawn after a storm that was supposed to feel sweet as the nectar from a perfectly ripe fruit, felt like nothing at all, not even a dullness was present, only a jarring silence as if everything had been muted, buried. 

A week of barely living. Consuming what involved the least amount of effort. A week of tasting death with every bite and hoping for an ending. Why did I have to try to stay alive? I wasn’t even here anymore. Would anyone care that I was gone, I didn’t know, I had no strength to ask or to tell.

*

Have you ever shied away from your own skin? Felt like tearing every one of your limbs apart just so a breath could flow freely into your lungs once more? I have.

Time wouldn’t make it go away, time wouldn’t, couldn’t change this. I was hollow. 

*

A rose in the garden turns towards the sunlight, it survived the storm and is proud. It has a life to live, people to greet with its blooming. I do not, not anymore. Every part of me wants to die and the wildest of flowers could not wake my senses through the bottomless morass I’m buried in. Trapped in a mindless maze with no doors, no windows, there could be no way out for me, I am sure of it. Each cut I see on my skin, I want to expand endlessly until finally I can be swallowed whole by its hunger. It’s all I dream of, the ending. *Diary entry*

The last dawn was beautiful, I could imagine how it must have felt for those that still could feel. The birds would not leave my side as if they knew tomorrow someone else would have to feed them. I didn’t smile when I left my fairwells to them. By nightfall I was ready to play my part. The stars of the darkest night above me, trees whispering their calming goodbyes, an owl visiting the graveyard to be, I had a plan. One cut was all it took, and I bled, I bled a red river into the night.