Kitchen Knife

Therapy

                He held the blade with white knuckles. It was the same knife his mother used to prepare dinner with. Wonder if she'd mind me borrowing it for tonight. Well, it wasn't like she would have the opportunity to interrogate him afterwards, anyway.

                His music was turned off. An unusual phenomenon. His note was dispatched on his desk, lodged under his history book. The clock was ticking, tick-tock-tick-tock. The acoustics of the rapidly moving hands made him think of that song, Pendulum, by Pearl Jam.

We are here and then we go,

My shadow left me long ago. 

To and fro, the pendulum throws.

                The lamp on his desk was dim and yellow. His shadow was wearing a black hoodie and black rugged jeans. On one hand, it held a quivering blade. The other hand was bare, his blue veins protruding from the pale skin that almost looked like it had never encountered sunlight. The blade made its way to the bare wrists, about to sink into skin.

                All his memories came back. Loser. Idiot. Dimwit. Emo. Names. That's what they called him.

                "What's wrong with you?!"

                "You're a creep!"

                "Go kill yourself!"

                I guess it's better for everyone when I'm gone, he thought. No more suffering...Unless we meet in hell again.

                As if this wasn't hell enough. The rain was pattering hail hard on the windows, but there wasn't enough water or ice in the world to distinguish the fires of his rage. So what, he had people who cared, right? People that cared enough to prescribe prozac and give saintly Cosmopolitan advice, but not enough to talk to his demons at night.

                "Rest well."

                "Things will change."

                "Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you."

                That's the point. There were no sticks and stones. He was too filthy to be touched, and adult's eagle eyes. Instead there were daggers of insults, batons of slurs and boulders of shame. They would pierce through his porous and feeble self, giving into thoughts of self deprecation and hate. Hate for them. Hate for himself.

                There was thunder. The storm wasn't going to end tonight. The lamp flickered, but stabilised. There was a branch scraping his windows from outside, just like the blades scraped at the windows of his skin at night.

                Nobody noticed, though. If you were a girl, people would question your fully-clothed attire. They'd get under your layers and try to see your darkness. They'd notice if you were distraught, sad or "tired". But as a boy, nobody noticed that the shades of your clothes got darker, that your sleeves grew longer or that you smiled less. Societal double- standards. Nobody bothered about how he felt.

                That's why he grew a hard shell of spikes, thorns, fire, and glass shards, to fend off anyone who tried to get too close to his soft-jelly inner self. Ones who'd try getting too close would be left wounded, their blood on his defences clearly an alert signal to ward off any other to-be trespassers. His defences containing him in his confined melancholy. His defences hurting him. His walls closing in, until they hopefully compress him to oblivion.