a cut and a smile

Kids watered and fed and bedded above, nightlights on and TV off.  I step down stair by stair, close the stairgate with a clack behind me.  Into the hallway. 

I have cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher.  I have untangled the lounge from its toy infestation, and wiped the walls clean of chocolate dessert (which for just this once, they ate on the sofa).  I walk deliberately down the very centre of the hallway to the front door.  Pause to flick the outside light on, then thumb the latch on the door so that it will just push open when my friend arrives.  To find me.

Alone for the first time.  Half an hour of me.  No longer hidden behind my childrens needs and friends concerns and families silent astonishment.  My crouching emotions have finally found me.  Suddenly they come…

In drunken bewilderment, my memories stagger around my heart.  Tripping on jutted-out failures, catching on dreams, yanking them and shredding them into nightmares.  My feelings off-balance, knocking me bodily from wall to wall as I walk the hall.  And that is when I stumble and choke; an emotional breath of fire and brimstone.  Hold, hold, hold.  (exhale) And breathe out, my mind excavating with the rush, leaving echoing memories, repressed actions now more certain.  One action, a sole lone act to take.  A decision no longer to make, but made for me by the silence of being deafened by my own roaring breath.  (inhale)

Breathing shallow now.  Everything is dizzy, except for the very centre of my vision, a tunnelled blur pin-pointing a single objective; an object the length of my arm, to hold in the palm of my hand and slide, like a smile, across my wrist.

To enter the kitchen, pick up a knife and walk to the bathroom is no trouble at all.  The sort of thing you do all the time, like changing a nappy or “there, there, let me kiss it better”.  Because I am dirty as sin and it hurts like hell.  And that’s the problem.  I know I’m not, not dirty or guilty at all.  But you can’t stop the feeling, can you?  You can’t stop loving, you can’t stop the nagging, lonely and selfish longing to murder the cause of it all; the feelings must be stopped, stopped dead.  The heart must be killed, drained from my wrists, a smile sculpted in my flesh, like the smile sculpted on my face all day; jollying my children on, reassuring my friends that I am A-OK; grinning like a Cheshire cat, but nine lives on, wasted in one single day, it’s time to bleed tears from my hands, like Jesus.  I die for their sins.  So noble, so romantic.  So…

I’m in front of the mirror now, looking myself in the eye, trying to find out just where I went.  And as I exhale my breath sticks to the mirror, fogging my reflection forcing me to wipe the wet away.  Instinctively I reach up and open my palm, knife clattering against the glass and crashing like a trainwreck into the sink, shattering my concentration enough to think a single thought, a whisper that rises to a shout, to a roar, the roar that deafened me is returning and I am listening, hearing for the first time all at once the reasons I’ve stopped myself in the past.  In a split second its come and gone, in a split second I see that suicide is not about leaving my oh-so-well-known life, it is about entering the unknown of death.  I suddenly fear death.  I step away from the sink and explore my fear.  I look at it, examine its shape, touch it and taste it, swallow it like a lover, take it deep in me and allow it to spread.  It’s not my fear.  It’s wrong, it’s not right.  It doesn’t quite fit.  I breathe in and out and in and out.  Slowly, hard, like sex.  I look into the mirror again and I know, I know that I can’t do it, can’t be that selfish, can’t end the pain of love broken and busted, with a cut and a smile.  But not for the usual reasons.  Not because I will be missed, not because of my kids, not because of my job, my friends, my family, not even because of my future and all that I could yet live and achieve.  Not for any of that did I stop suicide smiling on my wrist.  No. 

You wonder why I stopped my final selfish act?  Ah, I fought selfishness with true selfishness.  You see, self-pity can only be fought with self-preservation.  As I saw the hell that I was living, one thought and only one thought broke through; how would I know?  How would I know that if I died right there, right then, feeling just like that… how would I know that the bit in me that is exhaled from my body in death, the breath that cannot end, would not live this hell of my own making for ever and ever and ever? 

Like me, you may not believe in hell.  But if it is there, it is because we allow ourselves to live in it everyday and die there, living it in eternal night.  So here’s to life, to a world that deserves to know; that a cut will one day heal and a smile will one day show.