Demons (Jonathan Toews)

Chapter Thirteen

I had forgotten what it felt like to hate someone. I had forgotten how cold the blood in my veins could turn, how sour my saliva could taste, and how dark and wicked my mind could get. Hatred like this had only settled within my bones once before, for one other person, and that person was my mother.

The sunlight poured into my room as I lay in bed trying to settle down the hate in my body that had crashed over me during one of my painting sessions. My eyes traced every crack in the ceiling above me over and over again until my eyes grew tired. It was a welcoming feeling, but I refused to let it take over my body despite the horrible amount of sleep I had been getting.

Since that night, sleep had not graced me without the help of the pills that I ironically bought for Jon and myself before we became whatever we were. The first night I went without speaking to him, the night right after, I felt like taking the whole bottle and telling everyone in the world to eat shit, but as I stared at myself in the mirror, my tired eyes staring back at me, I couldn’t do it.

For the first time in my life, I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t pour more than one pill from the bottle.

Instead of freaking out and losing my mind on how I was suddenly a completely different person even without Jon in my life, I simply took the pill, went to my bed, and laid there, staring at the paintings I had hung on my walls.

Studying them, tracing over every color and bump, a smile forced itself onto my chapped lips. I was getting into a gallery because of these paintings, I was making something out of myself and I hadn’t even graduated yet. Imagine applying for a job with ‘having my own show at a gallery’ on my resume. It was amazing.

Since that night that I realized that I had something to live for, something I had control over, I felt better. I kept up my smile, I kept talking and hanging out with Casey, and I kept painting. Every free second that I wasn’t trying to sleep or doing other class work, I was painting, painting how I felt, what I saw from my window, or a distorted image from my memory.

Within a week of distancing myself from Jon, I had done about ten paintings, and about half of them were better than anything I had ever painted. When I emailed them to my professor, he gave me a wonder review, and informed me that he was sending them to the curator, because they were that beautiful.

Professor Jacob’s words in mind, I managed to peel my aching body back out of my bed and sit up, my bare feet connecting with the warm floor beneath me. The hate in my body had managed to fade out. My heart beat effortlessly again, my blood ran warm, and my throat lost the burning sensation that only came up right when I was about to cry, scream, or throw up.

Luckily, I did none of the three.

Pushing my body from the bed, I walked back over to the large canvas that was sitting on the floor and sat back down in the little circle I had created that was lined with mason jars of water, paper towels, palette knives, paint tubes, and bags of sand. Grabbing one of the palette knives that was tinted red, I scooped up some of the red paint I had mixed with paint and when to smear it on the canvas when a familiar buzz vibrated through the floor.

I moved a few used paper towels to find my phone, screen down against the floor. Taking it in my hand, I set my painting tool down and wiped some of the wet paint on my hand off on my sweats and then clicked the small button and watched as the screen lit up, showing that I had a missed call from a number I was not familiar with.

Since everything with school started brightening up, I saved Professor J’s number, Casey’s, and a few other people I had met so far from the few social things Casey and I had decided to do together.