Tonight
By: RDV
What compels a person to go on living?
Life is untenable, full of it; people are invulnerable, invincible, until they die. Eighteen year old Lailani may have thought along those lines, yes, lest those who know her, but scarcely, have been misinformed, or have misconstrued her.
That she is an anorexic is just a tiny part of it. She’s small, petite, too little to contain so large a sadness; but that’s not the point. That her mother never, from the start, favoured her aspirations to go to college was only the half of it. That she has been raised in a strenuous, blatantly discouraging household may be the other half. Her troubles skyrocketed, no one keeps navigation of her but herself. Nobody cares. Nobody is within reach. She is past the notion that the road will straighten out somewhere. There isn’t much chance of a change of heart. She is past rehabilitation, past any reinforcement that will make her love her life.
In her room she has spent one sleepless night after another, absorbed one fuck-up after the next, until her mind was too fatigued to cooperate. In here as well, where, in an embarrassing number of times she has contemplated slitting her throat, wrist, and any other part of the body where the pulse kicks, the door rarely swings open and closes to announce a presence other than hers. If she’s been asked how long it has been since she’s had a visitor, she’d probably have to go twelve years back when play dates were still a trend. The sofa bed in the corner stands often forlorn, even in night time, when she will curl up on the chair in front of the mirror. Perhaps, pitying herself for wanting to die alone.
Tonight the darkness is eerie. It feels like some hand will just snatch her away and do the suicide job so easily. Under dim light she can make out thin, haphazardly done scratches on her arms. No doubt the partner culprit is the saw-toothed bread knife her mother uses for chopping vegetables. Clop, clop, clop, she can hear the mechanical sound of the steel brushing across the pitiful cabbage, then striking forcefully against the chopping board underneath as her mother wipes her forehead at every heave out of gross instinct. She wonders if she can do the same to her arms, if tonight she can muster the strength. As she thinks of this, her face shows an unreasonable calmness that one will think what passes in her mind is no more tragic than a math problem.
She raises the bottle of insect killer on level with her eyes. ‘Could be fatal if drunk’ is nowhere on the caption. How inconsequential. But aside from that, is there adequate proof that it’s not deadly? She wishes that some flicker of knowledge would make her know what to add to its content to make it fatal. She doesn’t want the same mistake; her first attempt apparently wasn’t a success. She had made cuts on both her wrists but somehow, somebody found her in the bathroom before life marched out of her. Or maybe the cuts weren’t deep enough. At any rate, the she has already forgotten the pain they inflicted, but the motivation never left her. Other than that, she vowed never to use the same method again.
She was rushed to the hospital then. The ambulance, to her dismay, arrived with the precision required of it. The rescue team lifted her off the couch, 98 pounds and all, and dumped her on the stretcher. She could hear steps skittering down the hall as she gradually felt more and more drugged; people were rushing to save her life. But blood was flowing out of her, fast.
When she recovered, her family didn’t take it lightly. To this end, she isn’t sure if she has forgiven that day, the numbing heart pain their glances imposed on her. She was asked, harshly, to be seated at the master’s end of the dining table, the members of her clan, faces scowling in disdain, placing blame on her. Did she know how much her confinement cost them? Or did she know how much if it would’ve cost them had she kicked the bucket? They were scraping by for crying out loud! Yes, she was a curse to everyone. Yes, she should get out of herself now because she was getting on everyone’s tits with her fancy for another life some dimension else. They nagged, pecked, and bickered, her mother the longest at it. After they got tired of it, she was dismissed quickly. They didn’t give her chance to explain or excuse herself. Just when she thought she had been above reproach, they came blaring at her like this! Impossible.
No right procedures were carried out. But maybe her case is beyond lunacy that they didn’t send her to a therapist. Or maybe financially, there was no means. Or both.
She repeated the suicide attempts. It became a household routine. Her family members didn’t keep watch despite the considerably daunting propensity that Lailani would keep at it, thereby unwittingly providing her an advantage to go on. Somehow, they found ways to save her each time. At one point, she began looking at their eyes. They read, make no mistake about it, “Let her do her death process in peace.” They wanted her dead, they still do and will ever anon. It’s not worth putting up with her.
Tonight her brakes are off, she’s going to do it, going to stop ruining her life, stop bearing the yoke of wanting to die by ending life itself. She knows now that she has been afraid before that’s why she never achieved success in the matter. She has been a fool to be a chicken. The drone of the crickets is just by her window. She can sense them with utmost clarity. Because the insecticide doesn’t guarantee her purpose’s end, she opts to bring this agenda further from her usual venue. The town’s river is just a walking distance. She knows it isn’t a beautiful choice; she has always been loath to have her corpse discovered by strangers. But tonight the impulse is too great; it’s gathering up its forces to home on her, begging her to end it now because it has been delayed too long already.
She flexes herself up, follows her feet and mind and closes the door behind her. Storm, sleet and snow won’t stop her now.
At the river she opens her arms as if to embrace it, as if to dive unto it like a lover who has travelled a great distance to find it. Then for the last time, she curses.
What compels a person to go on living?
Life is untenable, full of it; people are invulnerable, invincible, until they die. Eighteen year old Lailani may have thought along those lines, yes, lest those who know her, but scarcely, have been misinformed, or have misconstrued her.
That she is an anorexic is just a tiny part of it. She’s small, petite, too little to contain so large a sadness; but that’s not the point. That her mother never, from the start, favoured her aspirations to go to college was only the half of it. That she has been raised in a strenuous, blatantly discouraging household may be the other half. Her troubles skyrocketed, no one keeps navigation of her but herself. Nobody cares. Nobody is within reach. She is past the notion that the road will straighten out somewhere. There isn’t much chance of a change of heart. She is past rehabilitation, past any reinforcement that will make her love her life.
In her room she has spent one sleepless night after another, absorbed one fuck-up after the next, until her mind was too fatigued to cooperate. In here as well, where, in an embarrassing number of times she has contemplated slitting her throat, wrist, and any other part of the body where the pulse kicks, the door rarely swings open and closes to announce a presence other than hers. If she’s been asked how long it has been since she’s had a visitor, she’d probably have to go twelve years back when play dates were still a trend. The sofa bed in the corner stands often forlorn, even in night time, when she will curl up on the chair in front of the mirror. Perhaps, pitying herself for wanting to die alone.
Tonight the darkness is eerie. It feels like some hand will just snatch her away and do the suicide job so easily. Under dim light she can make out thin, haphazardly done scratches on her arms. No doubt the partner culprit is the saw-toothed bread knife her mother uses for chopping vegetables. Clop, clop, clop, she can hear the mechanical sound of the steel brushing across the pitiful cabbage, then striking forcefully against the chopping board underneath as her mother wipes her forehead at every heave out of gross instinct. She wonders if she can do the same to her arms, if tonight she can muster the strength. As she thinks of this, her face shows an unreasonable calmness that one will think what passes in her mind is no more tragic than a math problem.
She raises the bottle of insect killer on level with her eyes. ‘Could be fatal if drunk’ is nowhere on the caption. How inconsequential. But aside from that, is there adequate proof that it’s not deadly? She wishes that some flicker of knowledge would make her know what to add to its content to make it fatal. She doesn’t want the same mistake; her first attempt apparently wasn’t a success. She had made cuts on both her wrists but somehow, somebody found her in the bathroom before life marched out of her. Or maybe the cuts weren’t deep enough. At any rate, the she has already forgotten the pain they inflicted, but the motivation never left her. Other than that, she vowed never to use the same method again.
She was rushed to the hospital then. The ambulance, to her dismay, arrived with the precision required of it. The rescue team lifted her off the couch, 98 pounds and all, and dumped her on the stretcher. She could hear steps skittering down the hall as she gradually felt more and more drugged; people were rushing to save her life. But blood was flowing out of her, fast.
When she recovered, her family didn’t take it lightly. To this end, she isn’t sure if she has forgiven that day, the numbing heart pain their glances imposed on her. She was asked, harshly, to be seated at the master’s end of the dining table, the members of her clan, faces scowling in disdain, placing blame on her. Did she know how much her confinement cost them? Or did she know how much if it would’ve cost them had she kicked the bucket? They were scraping by for crying out loud! Yes, she was a curse to everyone. Yes, she should get out of herself now because she was getting on everyone’s tits with her fancy for another life some dimension else. They nagged, pecked, and bickered, her mother the longest at it. After they got tired of it, she was dismissed quickly. They didn’t give her chance to explain or excuse herself. Just when she thought she had been above reproach, they came blaring at her like this! Impossible.
No right procedures were carried out. But maybe her case is beyond lunacy that they didn’t send her to a therapist. Or maybe financially, there was no means. Or both.
She repeated the suicide attempts. It became a household routine. Her family members didn’t keep watch despite the considerably daunting propensity that Lailani would keep at it, thereby unwittingly providing her an advantage to go on. Somehow, they found ways to save her each time. At one point, she began looking at their eyes. They read, make no mistake about it, “Let her do her death process in peace.” They wanted her dead, they still do and will ever anon. It’s not worth putting up with her.
Tonight her brakes are off, she’s going to do it, going to stop ruining her life, stop bearing the yoke of wanting to die by ending life itself. She knows now that she has been afraid before that’s why she never achieved success in the matter. She has been a fool to be a chicken. The drone of the crickets is just by her window. She can sense them with utmost clarity. Because the insecticide doesn’t guarantee her purpose’s end, she opts to bring this agenda further from her usual venue. The town’s river is just a walking distance. She knows it isn’t a beautiful choice; she has always been loath to have her corpse discovered by strangers. But tonight the impulse is too great; it’s gathering up its forces to home on her, begging her to end it now because it has been delayed too long already.
She flexes herself up, follows her feet and mind and closes the door behind her. Storm, sleet and snow won’t stop her now.
At the river she opens her arms as if to embrace it, as if to dive unto it like a lover who has travelled a great distance to find it. Then for the last time, she curses.
posted by Ria D. at
11:19 PM
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