Cold | Suicidal Todoroki

29 | Love

This story is not intended to promote or encourage actions/behaviors such as suicide, self-harm, abuse, violence, harassment, or substance abuse.

A bath of saffron mantled Todoroki's dorm. Silence buzzed through Todoroki's ears while his thoughts roared through his mind. He stared down at the final sentence that he'd written in his notebook, and with a sigh, he stood up from his dusty desk.

A part of me still wants to clean this desk, Todoroki thought while closing his notebook and canting his head to view the veil of dust clinging to the desk. It stands here, unable to move. A lifeless, inanimate object. Quite the layer of dust builds up over time. Gradually, the clean sheen of the desk fades away. Hazy, achromatic tendrils of dust eat its color. The desk is unaware of the dust. Those looking at it notice almost immediately. More dust, more time, more work. But why bother cleaning it? The desk will be dirtied with a new layer of dust. An endless yet preventable cycle.

He espied the final poem he'd written:

Frozen River

Dawn shatters the frigid night.
The snow seeps beneath the growing light.
Spring has finally arrived.
It envelops the dead that once thrived.

Cherish the fleeting light as it cries out.
Watch the tears force the flowers to sprout.
Even the frozen river capitulates to its wrath.
From a crystalline mirror to a weeping bath.

Fangs of ice splinter and break away.
All the unfeeling ice melts by midday.
Tears of a thousand reasons flow at last.
Imbued with numbed feelings of the past.

Light inevitably creates room for shadow.
Beaten down by time to a faded glow.
A rainy night devours the melting sun of hope.
Stumbling again over the same slippery slope.

Day and night cascade through an hourglass of time.
Such a normal cycle is less than sublime.
The seasons molt their feathers once more.
Longing for shards of the past that endlessly soar.

Hoping for when the river of agony disappears.
Mindlessly moving like clockwork gears.
Falling into a new rotation of overexposure.
Everything freezes into a monochromatic blur.

Merciless frost now savages the ground.
Winter perniciously perforates the river all around.
A world mantled in a thick haze of gray.
Was this not the desire to liquidate the fray?

The river at the heart of the forest stops.
A memory of a myriad of frozen teardrops.
Cracked ice is still simply ice.
Every desire comes with a price.

The dawn won't make a difference now.
Is such a damning reality worth a final bow?
The light won't melt the ice of indifference.
The reign of a benumbed world will commence.

A frozen river made impenetrable by force.
Time is a constant while seasons fly off course.
Day and night remain the same.
How many are there to blame?

Sardonic irony laughs at the new desire.
Only damage will arise from igniting the fire.
A mutilated world won't thaw the river.
Another rotation of watching the world wither.

Spring will come again like clockwork, right?
Surely, there's a reward for winning the fight.
The frozen river remains still in the sun's heat.
Tomorrow, today's consequences will repeat.

Todoroki ambled towards the chair he'd pushed beneath the noose that draped from the ceiling. "No wonder that desk always reminded me of myself," he muttered under his breath while standing upon the chair and peering into the maw of the dangling beast. "You might as well call this the spring for me. An escape from winter, at the bare minimum. Is this my reward or my punishment for trying so hard to only fail throughout it all? I guess I really should've been careful with what I wished for. Now that I have it, I can't get rid of it, and it's killing me more than anything else I might have been struggling with."