I'm standing on the roof of a skyscraper on top of a puddle of my own blood with an overwhelming urge to jump. Every inch of my body aches; a stinging, bitter sweet type of pain. Tears stain my pale cheeks as hiraeth washes over me like massive tidal wave. I'm barefooted and half naked in this brumous weather. My knees are scraped so bad that it looks like I rubbed sandpaper onto them roughly. Yet my forearms are bruised an ugly dark blue and purple with a swirl of a gooey yellow. My knuckles are bloodied from the cigarettes the men turned off on me and so are my feet.
The wind that gushes at me sends the scent of petrichor and ruffles my long, dark hair. It pinches at my scratched cheeks and jabs at my cut legs: raw and fresh.
I looked up at the dotted sky as a small whimper escaped my cracked lips. I constricted my eyes as I stared tentatively. My brain turned into a slushy and it splashed against the walls of my head as my knees turned into jelly and wobbled with every weak step I took. My hovering fear makes itself more present and cloaks me whole in a suffocating black bag of terror as the door to the roof begins to get pounded on. I had locked it, but those men won't stop pounding so damned harrowingly. Not until they have me. Until they've had their ways with me...
Again.
My stomach throbs just as the thought crosses my head and I force the puke back into me with a displeased gulp. Images of the nefarious faces and the bombinate from the men that echoed along with my screams for help displayed like an old movie clip in my head. I start to shiver all over as anxiety rises up in me like a tsunami and I enter a flight or fight mode. I take a panicked look around the roof and find...
Nothing.
I let a sob ripple through my whole being as my throat swells up and makes it hard to breath.
Jump, jump, jump... Just jump.
My mortified thoughts seemed to be ephemeral for before I realize it, I'm wobbling over to the rooftop's edge with a newfound determination and my feet leave a trail of blood on the roof. Where is the blood coming from? I haven't cut my legs that badly have I? Nor did they put out too many cigarettes, did they?
I don't care...
I'm curious but I'm not about to stop and check either. The scintilla of voorpret sends chilling shocks of electricity within me and places me in a trace. A trance that's numbing all of my pain and controlling the part of me that was once called sane and twisting it into a box that I'm about to toss out the door. Well...
I'm tossing it off of a skyscraper.
I hear the door slam open but it is already too late. I'm standing on the edge facing the door with my trembling middle fingers out and a wry and crooked smile on my face. The men, no, my father and his drunk buddies lash out and start to run towards me but it's too late. I've made up my mind, and seconds before they could catch me, my knees buckled and I started to fall.
The men screamed out slurred curses and I laugh soundlessly, allowing the colors around me to blur as my tears start to spill again. Blue and green, red and white, purple and black, pink and... Sprite?
A sprite poster? Really?
The wild winds smites at my back, causing my long brown hair to lash out and slap against my bleeding neck and cheeks. It stings. A lot. I feel the sharp pains I was feeling before the fall. The pain in my head that turned into slushy. The pain on my knees that look like sandpaper. The pain on my scratched neck and cheeks. The pain at my back. The pain on my shoulders. The pain in my throat. The pain in my core.
The unimaginable and ineffable pain.
It was then that I began to realize just how much I had truly suffered for a total of ten years. Ten years of imprisonment. Ten years of solitary confinement. Ten year of torture. Ten years of rape and abuse and incense.
Ten stupid years.
I realize just how much pain I'm actually in right now, and where the source the the puddles of blood truly where from. My ladyhood that is. Those men, no those animals, rammed into me, slitting open my core and shredding away at my innocence ever since I was fifteen nonstop.
Every godforsaken day.
I realize that death had been upon me since the first night I had been locked in the cell with my father and his friends. Maybe even before then. It was hovering over my shoulder and stabbing me in the gut with great pleasure. It laughed in my face as those men had their way with me and taunted me with the newspaper articles my father had shoved in through the mail hole. The tears my father was shedding in the pictures and the statements he was quoted to have said in the articles about missing his missing baby girl seemed cromulent.
I wanted to scream but my heart felt like it was in a war with my throat, for they were both swollen and tight and yes, raw, very raw. Do I truly wish to end it all here?
Yes. Yes you do. This is the end of your suffering. You aren't a survivor. Sometimes survival is the true torture.
I shut my eyes tightly and felt my heart swell in emotions I haven't felt in a while. Serenity and equanimity. Yes. This is what I wanted. This is what is supposed to happen.
For the family that never loved me.
F
or the drunk of my father.
And for me.
It's seems as if I'm falling faster now and the colors all blend into mixture of an artist's color palette. It's as if I've been grown into a whirlpool of colors. It's iridescent and luminous and...
Truly beautiful. The only good thing I've ever seen.
I'm getting closer to the ground, I can feel it. But instead of feeling desperate or anxious, I feel as if I'm a feather floating above the calm of the ocean. It's the first and last time in my whole life that I've ever been in complete and utter equanimity and serenity. It's so much so that it lifts the corners if my mouth into a smile.
This is the death of the abused and the beaten.
T
his is the death of mistreated and the misunderstood.
This is the death of Noella Carter.
The death of me.
