22: Despicable Me

My eyes were sore from all of the crying. Right when I left Austin and headed toward Cliff I began to suspect... suspect what? Surly I couldn’t have suspected that he was with someone else, or that he was using me, could I? I couldn’t have been so right. Austin’s speech had given me silent doubts. Then, I became paranoid. I thought it was all some big joke; all of it. I realized that my plans had blown up in my face.

I looked at the broken shard of mirror that had a little bit of fresh blood on it. All I could see was short brown hair crowding my eye, and make-up smeared all down my cheek. My drawn on eyebrows were smeared across my upper lid. I looked disgusting again.

What was the point of trying to look pretty? What was this make-up for? I realized just how ugly I had looked on my date with Cliff. The make-up was ridiculous. What was my peircing for? For fashion? For a statement? It was ugly, and was a stupid idea. Suddenly I had the urge to rip it out of my head.

My bedspread was thrown across the room, and my pillow was smeared black and brown with liner. My aunt was gone, like always. The stupid bitch. She was so clueless, and I hated it. She didn’t know anything. Not about me. Not about children or teenagers. She didn’t know about keeping care of food. She didn’t know anything.

I actually planned on going to Juliet’s, but I decided against it when I took out the mirror shard. My leg itched in pain. This time, the pain was hardly enough to make me feel better. I twirled the piece in my hand, and let it slip below my fingers, and stain the mattress.

I sucked in air, and jerked to life. My hand raised high above my head, and came down hard on my leg. A line appeared across my palm. A red line. Blood not only dotted from the wound, but dripped. A stream had formed. This made me wince, and I gritted my teeth. My throat hurt from screaming into the stained pillow, and my jaw hurt from grinding and gritting my teeth.

Why did Cliff matter so much to me if I had just met him? He should have been just another boy, yet I felt more than that. I felt like I had lost someone close to me. Though, I’d never known what that had felt like simply because I had never had anyone closer to me than Juliet. Cliff was the most I’d ever wanted to be with someone, and I had lost it. I felt close to him and Austin simply because... well, I didn’t really know. I just felt like they were closer than anyone had been back in New York. That made a lot of sense, considering my choice of friends back home.

Home. What was home? Certainly home couldn’t be with my father. This didn’t feel like home, either. I had never really known what home felt like, but I was sure you were supposed to feel safe, and not empty. Yet I felt alone and hollow here and at home. The happiest I had been was when I had had friends and what I thought was a relationship. That shattered, of course. I shattered it with Cliff, and I almost shattered it with Austin.

My hand reached for the glass, and I fumbled around until I could get an actual grip on it. My hand wrapped around it, and I brought the sharpest edge down to my upper thigh. Not toward the inside, facing the other leg, but out in the center of my leg. I drew in two small lines, that connected down into a “V” shape. The tool scraped against my skin, and caught and tore into it. After the blood began to seep up from those, I gave it a top. A small heart began to form in a red scrape, and then it was dotted with dark red. Then it transformed into a full blood-outlined heart. I slapped it once. The heart formed on my hand.

Again.

The blood seeped back through the cut and dripped down. My leg began to turn red, and blood rushed to it.

Again.

The blood exited through the heart, and flung into the air with each slap.

Again.

My sheets had little splotches in them now.

Again.

I didn’t think it was Cliff so much as it was everything that went bad in my life built up and up. I accused Austin of bottling things up, but I was guilty of that too. My emotions rose and rose, until Cliff detonated them, and I broke. I shattered. Though Cliff still mattered to me a great deal. He made me want to do anything just to be with him.

Now I really just wished I was an insect. Or dead. Either one would do. Because it was obvious that love at first sight was real- that also guaranteed that love itself was real- and you couldn’t just forget about love, even if it was at first sight. Especially if it was at first sight. And I was beginning to wonder if love’s existence extended between two people. At the moment it seemed a singular thing. The thought of two people being in love together seemed far fetched, and even made me a little sick. And now that I was in love, then I couldn’t just forget about it, and that would take time. So, during my time of waiting, I wished I could be an insect. That way no one would even know me. They wouldn’t know I’m there. They wouldn’t know my face. They wouldn’t even pay much attention to me. It was a grand idea.

I bit away at the inside of my cheeks up until I tasted metal in my mouth. A sign that I should stop because there was blood. I went back to setting my teeth and gritting them as hard as I could.

I looked down at the heart. Blood flowed generously onto the bed. Suddenly I realized just how deep I had cut. Oh well. A little loss of blood never hurt anyone. Besides, I was too depressed to even get up off the bed.

I grabbed the covers from the floor and pulled them back up. It felt good to be laying in a little cocoon. It almost gave me a fake sense of security. It gave me a barrier between me and everything else. I fumbled around blindly on the end table beside me. There was a king-sized chocolate bar there somewhere, I just had to keep looking.

Suddenly, the radio came to live and blared into the previous silence of the room. A love song. Out of everything, there had to be a sad, sweet love song written about some damned girl. Whoever she was, I wished she was dead. Only because she was loved by a man so much that he wrote a song for her. And I hated the song. The song reminded me of everything that could have been, but wasn’t.

Tears threatened to appear from the corners of my eyes, and I brushed them away quickly. I shut of the radio, peeked out from the covers, and grabbed my chocolate bar. It was more of a monster-size than a king-size. Like a Godzilla-size. I ripped it open viciously as if it had done something to me to make me hate it.

I picked the only one left with a filling in it, because food like this was obviously designed to help those suffering from depression. Eating food was almost like cutting when it was sweet and fatty. It worked in the same way, at least.

I broke off a square and crammed it into my mouth. The sweet chocolate melted into my mouth and dissolved along with the caramel. I didn’t even swallow it before another two pieces found their way into my mouth.

Food always seemed to help for a temporary amount of time. It did in the movies, at least. Actually it was the first time that I had ever “eaten” my feelings. I looked back down sullenly at the cuts on my thigh, and the glass that laid next to them.

I was disgusting. Everything about me. My face was repulsive; it was a snake’s face. There were cuts on my arms. I was eating tons of chocolate. I was obsessing over some boy I had met just days ago. Not only was I ugly but I was a fucking psycho.

I looked down at the chocolate, and decided that it took too much time to break of individual pieces. I put it up to my mouth and shoved as much of the treat in as possible. I was beginning to feel full around halfway through the chocolate bar, which was strange, because I really hadn’t eaten much that day. Not only was I afraid of the fridge, but I didn’t have an appetite for anything besides depression food.

I looked down at my stomach to see it protruding a little. I curled up into a ball, and rolls of fat formed. They disgusted me. Fat didn’t belong on a body that already had so much to worry about. Why was I so damn ugly? I looked at myself in the mirror shard again. Then I looked back down at my stomach.

“Fucking fat ass” was the first phrase that came into me. I realized that I had directed it toward myself. I didn’t need this chocolate; I was already growing fat. It looked like a monestrous amount of fat compared to when I first arrived in Maine. Had I really been eating that much? I swear I barely ate.

Yet I still bit into the monstrous bar. With each bite, each chew, and each swallow, I yelled at myself. I told myself just how disgusting I was. I kept eating and eating until the entire bar had disappeared inside of me. I crumpled the wrapper up and chucked it away from me. I hated the sight of it. I hated the sight of myself. I hated the feel of the chocolate trying it’s hardest to settle in my stomach, which was beginning to rumble slightly.

I felt sick. I had eaten possibly too much. When I started the bar, it felt like heaven. It felt right. Now it just felt disgusting. It felt like what three-hundred or so pound people do. It felt like what people who need to move around in electric shopping carts do. It felt like something that what I seemed to be becoming would do.

I looked down at my stomach. It seemed to have gotten even bigger. I was a gross piece of shit. And still I laid in my cocoon, and I cried hard. I kept crying and crying, just like the rain poured. I made myself sick. Not only did I hate the body that I was in, but I also hated the soul that was inside of it. Everything about me was becoming despicable. I was despicable.

Despicable me to sit here and cry about myself. I deserved the salty liquid pouring from my eyes. I deserved every bitter tear. I had brought this on myself for being so damn ugly. I had brought it on myself for trusting Cliff. I was so damn stupid. I brought it upon myself for falling in love with someone I had just met.

How could I have let it all happen?

That was the question I asked myself. Yet I felt I knew the answer. Because I was just a fucking idiot who let things get carried away. Why? Because I didn’t know any better. When that therapist on the phone told me I was an adult, he couldn’t have been more wrong. I was just a fucking child. I was an idiot. I was a snake. I was scum. I laid in the bed and cried until my eyes ran dry. Then, of course, I fell asleep. Nothing but scum.