Chapter Text
I'm standing in a dark room, looking down at a broken body painted in blood. Time of death, 00:13. A shiver crept upon me, wracking tremours from my body. I did it. Dawn would peak before they would hear the deafening silence, witness the wrong stillness, emptiness - too late. The corpse lay trapped in time, blood-stained wrists and empty pill bottles, the final coloured capsules scattered across the floor like loose bracelet beads. I step over it, reaching the desk with a broken mirror, a familiar, bitter, chalky taste coating my tongue. My hand reaches for several white envelopes, stacked neatly upon the scratched plastic, black ink scrawled across each one; letters. Each containing an unspoken goodbye, tinged with bitterness of regrets left to rear its ugly heads. I lift my eyes to the broken mirror, the reflection distorted by spidering cracks in the glass. A girl, a boy; I could see both, yet neither, the image too broken to tell. I reach my hand out, to be able to touch the one I saw in the glass, but my fingers closed around nothing, intangible. Even here, there were those who did not belong. Those who would forever remain out of reach.
•••
They remembered when life had been easy: black and white. Girlfriends and boyfriends, sleepovers, and pranks and daydreams - they thought...hoped even, that it would last forever, how foolish. Reality hit under the guise of 'growing up', of their body becoming foreign and no longer theirs, it didn't fit: a spirit in a body suit. The world wasn't black and white anymore, there wasn't just girls, and boys, and happiness wasn't just happiness. Then conversation turned from innocent kisses to sex and drinks as friends became strangers lusting over a dream they couldn't understand. Instead they found themselves alone on an isolated path, unexplored. Hurt, hatred, humiliation - they couldn't hide, couldn't run, but found an escape in the forbidden and perhaps lost themselves at the same time. They chased the feeling of beaded blood that traced their skin, of highs that made them forget the pain, if just a moment: a coloured numbness that drowned the static of life. The brightest stars burn the fastest, fall the furthest, yet the world kept spinning as their life finally came to a standstill.
Time of death, 00:13.
•••
I'm standing in a dark room, all is quiet. I kneel down beside the body, skin, ice to the touch.
"Goodnight Kalyke." I murmur, and I feel myself hoping as I fade. The hope that there was something, anything beyond this. The night was still, the silence a balm over my thoughts jumping out like crickets. 'I do not regret my choice', I think to myself, as I whisper my final goodbye, and welcome the darkness with open arms.