Work Text:
You used to never have difficulty walking past knives, and you don't know where it started. Maybe it was when you got home and your mother was cutting vegetables, or when all you could do was sit at home and watch the cooking show because they were still deciding what to do with you, or maybe when its when your best friend blew their fucking brains out. You don't know anymore. You don't care anymore. You are done with psychoanalysis.
You sigh, bitter and tired because idealism was so last winter, when your friend died, when you lost every good thing you had built up that year (the year you were worth something), when you stood up on a desk like that would fix everything. It didn't. Now you're at home (he'd told you to get down) and your only saving grace was that you couldn't cry anymore when your father yelled at you ('look at me, Todd, what kind of man are you' actually made you laugh). You hypothesise that you stopped crying when you were dragged forcibly from the desk, when you were dragged to the office and you were proud and you felt like existing for once. It was only as students started peering out of their classrooms you realised that now you were taking them down with you and you had signed up for this and oh god what have you done to them. Now all you had was your fucking pride and some red scratch marks running down your arm. And now you weren't seizing (had you ever seized) you were reaching, grappling for just a glimpse of the day. Walking felt like carting bricks on your shoulders and any sense of balance that you might have had once was shot. You knocked into sharp corners on accident, and then again on purpose because sometimes a corner to the hip was more effective than scratches.
'The knife is probably better', you thought to yourself as you stare at the butcher knife on the kitchen counter, the sharp blade staring down at you. You wouldn't know, of course, you'd never been that brave. But now you don't think bravery was a requirement. And then something was pulling you, an invisible wire dragging you by your waist and digging into your skin until you were in the kitchen and the knife was right in front of you. You are covered goosebumps and scratches from the day before and the knife is in your hand now. If you were still a poet, it might have been beautiful. But the poet had been drained out of you, oozed out of your pores like pus and now it was ugly, ugly and shiny and you bet it would be so easy to draw blood. You gently rest the metal against your skin, cursing its existence with every haggard breath that sullied your lungs. It's just like Neil and the pin.
And with that awful thought you fling the knife across the kitchen floor, racing out of the kitchen and up the stairs and into your room and you're hiding under the sheets again and you're clawing scratching yanking is that hair you've pulled out hair you need a haircut everything is too much and this was NOTHING LIKE NEIL AND THE PIN.
You lie there for five minutes before you slink downstairs, put the knife back on the counter and watch more tv. It's an ad break. They're selling knives. You whimper.