Three hundred and sixty eighty days before
Two hours before it started, I heard the light footsteps and vibrant laugh coming from the stairwell. Even with the carpeted floors, her voice echoed. She walked through the doorway and I saw her. I haven’t been the same since. It was October thirty first, she was a last minute addition to the group that I was with. She was short, with a small head, thin black hair, crooked teeth with lips like pencil lines, she had a figure so fragile I thought it might shatter if she took another step. She was a mess, her body screamed chaos and I’d never seen anything like her before. I was enthralled with with the way she walked, her teeth showed through her smile and I had never seen so much false confidence in the entirety of my existence. Sitting here, I no longer can remember her face, nor do I want to. I remember the tickle of her laugh in my rib cage, just slightly. See, it’s been so long since I’ve heard her voice that sometimes I forget we were ever friends in the first place. Most days I wake up wishing that I never met her, so I don't have to walk around pretending that I'm angry at her, or hate her for what she did to me, because I don't. It's just something that happened. Her birthday just passed, and I felt a little bad for not taking her to breakfast and asking for a re-do, but then I realized that I’m not the one one at fault. It’s getting pretty hard for me to miss her now that I'm starting to remember who she was, because it’s not only her teeth that are crooked, it’s her whole soul. Starting from the gaps next to her big toes, all the way up her spine right into that mind with the crooked thoughts and corrupted memory, the doorway must’ve been broken, too, because she never let me in. There’s the problem with being friends with a person who resembles a broken door; the longer you refrain from knocking down the hinges, the rustier and tighter they get. I believe that I was so fascinated with the clockwork of her being that I left no fascination for myself, nor anything else. I had spent so many hours trying to calculate the angle of her cheekbones that I left no numbers on the protractor for the hollow contours of my own body. And I never told her about her skin like bed sheets, how she tried to tuck the complexities of herself underneath her six hundred thread count image of simplicity, but she couldn’t swaddle up the truth of herself into bed every night, especially because I sleep on the same brand. I had been warned about the drugs in the streets, but there had never been a mention of the ones with the amber eyes and beating heart, even though they did the same damage to my brain.
Eighty four days before
It was August 11th at ten fifty one p.m, I had consumed five thousand, five hundred and ninety milligrams of aspirin and three glasses of water in less than thirty minutes. I was talking to her over the computer about her outfit that she chose for school registration the next day; she had no idea what I had done. We had been together hours before and it wasn’t that I had a bad day with her, it was that even though I had a good day, I couldn’t think about anything but death. She didn’t notice that anything was wrong, even when she tried on that black pencil skirt that was too loose at the bottom, and asked me how I liked it, I didn’t answer her. Instead, I stared right into the pigment and it consumed my entire mind for a moment, or two. Every shoe was the same color as that skirt, her hair and her eyes absorbed the feelings that I felt but they reflected the shadow into the shape of my body onto the floor of the mall. I had been thinking about death a lot. For about three years I watched from the sidewalk, or inside of the car imagining myself as just another piece of roadkill on the pavement. People notice the mess but they don’t mourn, I am just another animal. Maybe that’s what I was and still am afraid of, not being missed, or being missed too much. I sat in my bed, texting her for an hour and seventeen minutes before I told her what was going on. She didn’t seem to understand why I would swallow thirteen pills of four hundred and thirty milligrams each, because I had her. She questioned me, “Did you ever think of me? You’d be leaving me here alone. Well anyway, too much of anything is bad for you. Go to bed and I’ll see you tomorrow.” Did she ever think that I wouldn’t see her the next day? I wonder. And months later, when we were fighting over her recklessness, she told me, “If I tried it, it would work.” She was referring to death of course, my attempt, but did she remember that night? Does she still?
