Congratulations !
You have been awarded points.
Thank you for !
- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: Pain / Problems / Adversity
- Published: 12/31/2023
To be never remembered again
Born 2006, F, from London, United KingdomThe air feels humid and heavy as I walk into our living room. My mom is sitting on the couch, looking at her phone; probably chatting with someone. I go to the kitchen; the dim light of the sun shines through the small curtain, drawing amorph figures on the ground and on my body. I stand in the sun for a few moments; I can somehow smell it, as if the static particles of the air were carrying a long lost scent. It smells like childhood: like golden hills with lambs pushing their noses into the yellow grass, like rooster crowing, like climbing through moss covered wooden fences to a wheat field. It smells like the things I have done as a little boy; the things that were done to me as a little boy. I rather avoid remembering the latter. I breathe in the summer air, the air that carries many hurtful and euphoric memories, like a mother carrying her dead child.
I turn towards my mom. She is still looking at her phone. I hesitate a bit, standing reluctantly in the itching claws of the sun. I breath in shakily and say to her:
'I want to kill myself'
I wait a few seconds, looking at her. She doesn't respond. She smiles at her phone and I can hear the sound of a sent message. And then she asks:
'What did you say, honey?' without looking up from her phone. I can feel my stomach drop and I bite my lip, pushing out air through my nose shakily.
'Nothing' and I smile at her.
Maybe I was too quiet, I think. It’s not her fault. After all, I could have said something quite irrelevant, something that is not even worth hearing. If she knew what was going on inside my head she would’ve heard what I said. She would’ve paid attention. She must think that it was something trivial.
But it wasn't.
I stand there for a few moments, vaguely staring at the tiles of the kitchen. A small ant is carrying a piece of bread on its back, slowly making its way through the cracks of the floor. The sun is touching my body, and it reminds me of something that I don't want to be reminded of, so I step into the shadows. And then I walk to my room.
It's dark inside, the air conditioner is humming quietly, breaking the utter silence. My cat is sleeping next to my bed, her white fur looks like cotton candy. I suddenly want to hug her so hard that we become one, so that when I am gone she can come with me, because wherever I end up, I will know that I am safe with her. I want to bury my face into her fur, breathing in her kitty-smell to remember. To remember things that are worth remembering.
But I don't do those things. I just walk to her and put my hands on her tiny head. She wakes up, starts purring and looks at me. She meows. I know that she feels something, because cats tend to feel when something bad is about to happen. I want to cry because I realise how much I love her; so much that I want to meld into her, I want to never lose the memory of her existence. I know that she will wait for me patiently to come back after I am gone, never giving up on the hope that she will see her friend one more time. Maybe she will die remembering, but not knowing what she had done to lose me.
I start crying because this thought hurts so much, I feel like it's ripping my heart out, leaving nothing behind but a ravenous abyss, gobbling up what’s left from my insides.
'Good-bye.' I say to her, and she looks at me. Her eyes remind me of the gleam of a labradorite stone on the bottom of a lake.
’Please forget me.’ A teardrop falls onto her ivory-white fur, and she licks it off. Then I turn around, not looking back because I know that she will follow me if I do. I enter the bathroom and close the door. I start the sink, blocking the drain and stand in front of the mirror. A ghoul is looking back at me, with vortex eyes and a scarecrow head. It’s the mere shadow of a human being, a vessel of something rotten that is now gone. I cannot stand looking at the figure; I want to gouge out its swirling eyes and rip off the scarecrow head, and I want to scream so that even my mother can hear me, even those can hear me who tainted my childhood, who stripped me of my innocence. But I do nothing and I stay quiet, even though I know that I cannot morph my rage into sorrow anymore to save myself from the burning fire of my madness. I think in the end I have to realize that my anger was the only part that truly cared.
Suddenly the sound of the flowing water pulls me back to reality. The tub is almost overloaded, so I turn off the sink and open the cupboard that have been untouched since my father has moved out of the house a year ago. It smells from male aftershave which reminds me of the times when my dad would let me sit on his shoulders and I felt like a giant, unbreakable. I take a razor and strike it to the tiles’ the blade falls onto the ground with a tinkling noise. It looks dainty, and yet so vile. I take off my clothes; only now do I notice that they are covered in mud. I don’t remember how I got dirty anymore. I immerge into the water with the blade resting patiently on my palm. It burns my body, boiling me alive. The flickering of the lamp on the plain ceiling fills my head, bulging into an unbearable frequency as I clench my eyes and put the razor blade to my wrists.
It seems almost mild, sterile somehow. The world around me falls quiet, as if I was placed into a vacuum, my existence caves in and my muscles relax. I put my hands on my chest to feel my heart, to reassure myself that there is something in me that carries the remembrance of human nature. Is this humanity? Is this the feeling that I have been looking for in my entire life? The feeling of doubt and peaceful regret that lies in the knowledge that I have done something irreversible and that’s okay because nothing really matters. I open my eyes; I can see warm, pink blood spreading in a tree-like shape from my wrist. I know that I don’t need to look now; there is nothing to be seen anymore outside of me. So I turn my face and lose myself in the pink, throbbing emptiness. Something fills my lungs, but it’s not water or air, it’s something heavenly. Light is spreading through my body, and I shut my eyes to think about my cat and the old wooden fence and the silky noses of the lambs one last time. But I cannot smell the wheat anymore and I cannot feel the sun on my skin. As the throbbing of the world around me slows down the memories lose their color and turn gray. I breathe out; the world around me sighs and I can’t tell if my eyes are open or closed anymore. It doesn’t matter, one way or the other. I can feel my body tremble with one last pulse of my heart that has always been there in my chest, and I grip the fading image of the untouched wheat fields, but it’s no use.
The light falls into the abyss of oblivion with the memories of a lost life, to be never remembered again.
.png)
.jpeg)
COMMENTS (3)