Annabelle

The Stars

!@#

There are not a lot of things that will get me motivated about anything. I don’t really want to do anything. It takes everything in me just to simply get up in the morning. No one will understand my lack of desire to even live. My mom has been abusive ever since my dad left. She started drinking, and bringing home countless guys that were never good enough to even breathe the same air that I am. After the guy would leave, like the always did, my mom would blame me, and take it out on me. My little sister, Angela, is being raised to hate me. She is now eleven, and blames everything that happens to her on me, and when she goes to fight me for it, I have to let her or mom will double everything she does. I am in charge of waking up early in the morning and getting those two up and active for the day. I have to make them food, make mom her coffee, and start her car, scrape her windows if our unpredictable Ohio weather calls for it. Then I have to catch a bus to school, or I’m walking. I barely have enough time to eat, on those days I’m lucky enough to eat. My best friend, Carly, moved away when I was in seventh grade. So even at school, I am a loner.

When people who notice ask me why I cut, I tell them the truth. Cutting works wonders. For the fifteen seconds - two minutes that I am in pain, it is something that I can control. It’s not pain that my mother has or is causing. It’s not something my sister does. It’s me. I control the pain. I control how much pain, how much blood. And in those limited number of seconds, I am free. I am free of everything but that pain. That pain is the only thing I am thinking of. Nothing else in the world matters.

Suicide has crossed my mind multiple times. Am I suicidal? No, I am not. But when my mom threw me out of the house in temperatures reaching down to negative twenty, that was the last straw.

With a knife in my hand, I trekked up a hill that held a single tree. On the other side of that mountain, held our forest of trees. It is very common to get lost in there, so not very many people go in there. I used to try to get lost, maybe a family of wolves would adopt me, or something. I walked up to the base of the tree, put my back to its trunk, rested the knife against my forearm, and looked up into the night’s sky. What beautiful stars… I dug the tip of the knife into my left arm, just below my elbow. I pushed hard against it, and drug it down, down, down, stopping at the heel of my palm. The pain was excruciating. I shifted the knife into my left hand, feeling faint. I did the same to my right arm, with a shaky hand and barely any pressure at all, but enough to get a fine red line. I threw the knife, sat back, and looked up. Those stars…

Off in the distance, behind me, in the forest, I heard a lot of explosions. Hm...must be what hell sounds like. I glanced into the stars for a few more seconds, until I heard someone talking. What were they saying?

“Look...female...bleeding…”

I glanced in the general direction of the noises. Was it the cops? Where they going to save me? Give me back to my mother? Surely, they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t give a sixteen year old back to a mother that kicked it out in this weather. ...would they? I had to get them to leave me alone.

“Please…” I barely pushed out. Leave me alone. Let me die.

Two blue lights came into my blurring line of sight. I tried to keep my eyes open. What were those lights?

Then everything went black…