I watch my legs swing. Up, down, up, down. Like a weird looking pendulum that’s off every three beats or so. My heels kick the ground as they plummet down, my calves hit the bare frame of my bed, and it continues. The weirdest thing is that I can’t feel a thing, although there will be large, purple bruises by the morning.
Nothing is alive in me anymore.
I kick out, watch my legs crash down. Heavy, back to weightless, and heavy again. I can’t decide what I am.
My dad comes in, sometime around where the sun is setting, and casts a shadow across my pendulum legs.
He panics when he sees me, and throws a box of Kleenex towards my bed before commencing to dab my lip. He says it’s gushing blood down my chin and onto my shirt.
I don’t care. I’m not even sure what I’m wearing, or if I’m wearing anything, or what I’m doing in three minutes, or of anything because all I can do is be sad.
It’s a weird feeling, when there’s nothing to look forward to. When there’s no slight desire to call someone, to check my phone for texts, to wish somebody was there with me. To just feel nothing, and hate it, but then be feeling so little that all the sudden I forget what hate feels like. And then I go back to feeling nothing until I realize I should really feel something, or at least hate everything, or, if nothing else, be hopeful for something to happen at some point. But I’m not.
My head hits the floor after the light has left the room, and my pendulum legs stop swinging. I watch the books instead, because I don’t know if I can move my head and that’s where I’m looking. Sometimes I watch red trickle down onto the floor from my lip, too. In a different time, I would probably tell myself to stop biting it.
But I think that’s the only reason I’m not screaming, so I keep biting and lying on the floor and missing my pendulum legs.
The world turns. People laugh. People cry. Lives are made and destroyed.
And I lie there, on my white carpet, and don’t care about the spreading red stain, or the fact that somewhere lives are happening. Because they shouldn’t. Or maybe they should and mine should be happening too, but I don’t want it to, and I know it never will again.
Nothing will ever work again. Not my heart or my body or my mind or the clock in my head or the moon or the world. It will stop turning for me, because half of me is gone and when you cut something in half it dies.
But some idiot somewhere decided not to clean up the other half, and let it rot away on Earth.
Somebody tells me to stand up. Somebody else screams. There are noises everywhere and I don’t care. People are talking and none of their voices are right, so I lie here and wish they were all somebody else.
“You’re going to therapy,” someone says, so I lie on the ground because life doesn’t work for me. People yell at me and tell me I’m stubborn, but I’m not anything anymore, so I don’t mind being stubborn. It’s something that’s not nothing.
Kathleen Mores is stubborn.
My dad carries me out to the car, because I’m stubborn. I feel sympathetic eyes on me as I sit in the front seat. I don’t put my seatbelt on, so my dad does for me, and then we’re driving somewhere.
