Sympathy For the Devil

5

After Li dropped me off from our much needed caffeine run, I found myself wavering on the edge of my apartment building's rooftop. Pebbles and small fragments of rock slipped out beneath my beat-up converse, making their descent off of the roof. The sound of the scraping rocks beneath my foot made me wince. I'm too close to the edge of defeat. Too close to giving up and jumping off of the edge.

My footing wavered closer to the border, the city traffic coming closer into my line of vision. One more step and I'd be making the plunge into the unknown. What truly lies beyond here, oblivion, heaven, hell, or a new reincarnated life that will be more blissful than my life now.

Who's to say who's notions and ideations of death are correct. But I hope whatever is beyond is better than what's here now.

Wherever my mom is, I crave to join her. And that's dangerous and selfish. It would destroy my family or what's left of my family. I couldn't do that to them. It wasn't right that my mother did that to us. Why would I follow in her firm footsteps? Her selfish fucking footsteps left me with immoral tendencies that are just plain self-centered to a degree. Just like her. That's what this all comes down to, her selfishness. She should have never left me that note.

I never showed anyone the note. I kept it tucked away in my underwear drawer where no one would find it. I never even mentioned the note to Luke.

    Watching someone die is a nightmare-inducing horror that you vividly imagine even when you shouldn't and even when you desire to move on from the past traumas. I closed my eyes and imagined being my mother standing up here stewing in her decision to leave me motherless. She would probably explain how she had to do it so she could be freed from these shackles that are bound to human lives. Or she might talk down to me like a child explaining that she was simply miserable and death was her only option for escapism. But I wanted to be enough for her. To make her proud. I just wasn't enough. None of us were. And that kills me.

    Sinking to my knees as the pebbles scraped against my distressed jeans and pierced into my exposed skin, I let out a mangled cry and then a scream to the void. Every sound that managed to escape and clambered to the surface sounded like animal noises. Incoherent and discombobulated. Grief can sometimes not be expressed by words, but by letting out everything buried deep in your throat. It sounds ugly. It is ugly. It's an unpleasantness that needs to be unleashed or the ugliness will consume you until you are devoured by it. It needs to be released into the world or it will take over whatever speck of light you have left. Just like it stole mine.

The noise sounded animalistic and guttural. The screams were swallowed whole by the cityscape. It's just another noise pollutant swallowed by this vast universe. It's taken and carried and eventually disappears into this atmosphere of waste as another human erasure.

    I let the pebbles turn my exposed skin red and raw, my hands and knees beginning to dribble blood. My masochistic urges were being pleased as I let the stones dig deeper into my skin, embedding into my open wounds. The intense force began welting the areas that would soon turn black and blue from the pressure. In some sick twisted way, I felt that this is what I deserved. The pain. The pleasure of pain. The aliveness of feeling...Something.

    As I sank lower to the ground, the pebbles danced along my skin before digging into the surface like their predecessors. The storm brewing up above is ready to burst. The sky is darkening around me.

Soon after the clouds swarmed my line of vision, the rain began. Not a light Fall drizzle, but a downpour. Thunder roared in the background as lightning crackled in the distance, the light remaining far away from this rooftop.

The rain tickled my cheeks and mixed with the blood around my hands and knees turning the blood from a harsh red to a tinted shade of pink. I let my hair out of my loose ponytail and stared at the rain as it turned my hair a darker shade of midnight. The hair cascaded along my shoulders, looking longer as my hair became weighed down by the heaviness of the rain. My hair did begin growing out a bit since I chopped it off in the bathroom during one of my dark days, now my hair reaches my shoulders again. I miss my long locks and regret my impulsive decision to chop my hair off. The beauty of hair is that it comes back, though. My hair used to be much longer and curly. I blame my Irish roots for the unfortunate color.