Once again I was in the corner of my room. After a day filled with teasing, hitting, and bullying, I was done. Tears -hot and salty- traveled down my face once more and it felt as if I could do nothing about it. Life you cruel women, tell me what should I do? I got up and went to my dresser and took out my family photo. I was about to do this for them, I was about to make them happy again.
I was nothing more than a pest to my family. On many occasions they had told me so. I was a burden on my sweet and delicate mother and a headache to my father. I didn’t do my homework for school, I missed classes and I got drunk whenever I felt depressed. No one needed me in this home. I was just trouble. I was a grain of sand pestering their eyes. Two days in a row I had gotten beat up by the same guy who said he loved me. Today my father slapped me across the face called me a whore and walked out. That was just this afternoon.
I was in my room still, it had been hours. I held the picture close to my chest, crying as softly as possible. By now I was crying a river and my eyes were most likely red. I walked to my dresser again and looked into the mirror. Staring at the mirror I smiled at myself. Mascara was running down my cheeks, eyeliner smeared all over my face, and blush made, my already red face, seem brighter. “Keep crying,” I told myself, “You are weak.” I couldn’t stare at myself anymore, I was looking sickly. I went back to my safe little corner. Anger came over me. I felt weak, defenseless, ugly, useless, worthless, and more than anything I felt ashamed.
I remember everything that had happened that morning. My mother and father fighting, and my siblings cried in a corner just like me. My father struck my mother so hard he sent her tumbling to the floor. My baby sister cried hysterically trying to stop my father from hurting my mother again. Her small little fist pounding my father’s leg until he hit her too. The yelling my father did to my mother telling her he made a mistake marrying her. “You carried that stupid brat in your womb for nine months! She should be your responsibility not mine!” Always yelling about me. Always blaming her for giving birth to the mess of a child that is me. My mother with her kind eyes would look my way and tell me to run. I never did, I always confronted my father with everything I had. More than once now we both had been sent to the hospital from our fights.
I shook the memory away and focused on the here and now. I was a wreck but my family was no better. My father an alcoholic and womanizer, my mother stupid and weak, my siblings young and defenseless and me? I was a combination of all of them. The only strong one in the family seemed to be little Abigail who was only two years old. For her sake I hope she never remembered me once I carried out my plan. For my others siblings sake I hoped they don’t follow the same path I would.
I was enraged now and in my cloudy state of mind I grabbed my silver hair brush and threw it at the mirror. Farewell reflection, I thought. I watched it break into pieces and forced myself to laugh. I stepped onto the pieces of broken glass. The shards of glass at my feet tempted me to cut, to just feel the rush once more. What the hell? Why not do it? I picked up a long piece of glass. It resembled a dagger and it was probably the sharpest piece if them all. I looked at my reflection in it and smiled cynically at how hopeless I had become. I dug the piece slowly into the flesh of my arm. I wanted to savor the pain as much as I could without screaming out in agony. I saw the blood drip down my arm and onto the floor, its color almost fluorescent. I walked on the glass slowly again and felt it dig into the thick skin of my feet. I cried out in pain not able to help it, lucky me, no one was home. It would be just so easy to just end it right here and now. Forever gone never to be heard from again. I held the piece of glass high in the air as if it were a symbol of honor and cut my left wrist. I switched the glass from my right hand to my left quickly and slit my other wrist. I dropped to my knees feeling a type of pain I could never imagine. Too weak for life, maybe even too weak for death.
