Sunday, September 2nd 2012

I don’t remember the police pulling up in the driveway over the volume of my music. I remember that it was almost ten at night, and I was comfortable, coiled in blankets with the things that I liked, words and melodies drugging me into a sense of peacefulness, a shroud to shut myself away from the world for a little while. A cold, metal object was in my curled fist. My mother called for me, the rough pages closed around the razor, splitting the paper as a deathly bookmark. I pulled my pants back on, slowly moving them over deep red lines and back over my waist.

There were two officers in the hallway. They had received a distress call from a friend of mine, her pleading voice an echo of my own emptiness, her words of worry repeating her fear that she may have already lost me. They asked to check my wrists, pushing up my long, striped sleeves. They found nothing but pale, unblemished skin with a heartbeat racing below. I can remember the distinct feeling of the brushstrokes of red pressing against the jeans on my thighs.

My lungs were weighed with the lack of life-providing oxygen inside them. I was running on empty, my stomach reflecting my legs’ burning with the want for a proper meal that hadn't been filled since the last Monday.

I can remember the way my mother cried.

I remember knowing that I had done this to her, she didn’t deserve this much more pain in her life, it was my fault, an echoing feeling in my mind, knowing I was why she was hurting.

The officer’s words had come to me, blurred, through my own haze of unfocused thoughts, my mind blank and my body aching. I remembered I had soccer the next day. They had left before I came to, and I was being held against my mother’s side, tears falling into my locks of blonde hair. Words burned my mouth, down in my throat with the lock and key of my teeth digging down into my tongue.

I don’t remember my father leaving, I don't remember my mom’s long, shouting conversation with him. I remember my sister’s boyfriend, still new to the family, holding my hand and crying, repeating words of he couldn't bare to loose another person he loved. He pressed a small golden pin into my hands.

I remember the phone call to the police. I remember falling asleep at two in the morning, leaning on my sister and hearing her hum me lullabies. They still hadn't found my father.