Brutally Beautiful(87)

There are never any easy answers for the questions that came with violence. Thomas made a goddamn videotape of his farewell speech, his suicide note to the world, and left it in the front seat of his car blaming me for everything, making everyone who watched it believe it was all my fault, which was all bullshit. I’d never known he’d go to such bloody lengths to hurt people. Nevertheless, for the rest of my life, I would constantly fight battles with invisible demons because of him, and whatever triumph I accomplished thus far was little to me now, as I stood in front of this woman, because I wanted to be a man she could confide in, someone who is not so damaged. Something about her, standing in front of those flames made me have hope. That made me calm, like the cool misty rain that comes after the chaos of a hurricane.

There were things that I never wanted her to find out about me. There were things I’d done that I felt weak for doing, yet I did them out of feeling so helpless and so full of despair I saw no other options. Did she feel as helpless in her situation to have had to use violence on someone she had once loved?

There were things that changed in me so completely from that one day that reverberated into everything and everyone in my life. My life became one huge domino chain, piece by piece, smashing into each other, knocking one another down. I was nothing more than a flimsy house of cards and one strong gust of wind tore me down, blowing my cards to the ends of the earth.

The demons I faced were not only the nightmares from that day, but the faces of the people whom I let down every day after that, because I couldn’t hold myself together. My mother, God, my mother found me when I slit my wrists almost to the bone. I will never forget her expression. I will never forget that horror, and I would never forgive myself for it.

I could remember that moment as if it were a mere minute before. My mother unscrewing the hinges of my bedroom door, so quietly that I had no idea what she had been doing until the door fell flat on the floor of my room.

Tears poured from my eyes that day, for the first time since the shooting, when I was shoved into the back of an ambulance. The expression on her face broke my heart. See, I didn’t stop to think about how it would affect her; I just wanted to stop my own pain. The paramedics, if you could call them that, orderlies maybe, since they had no knowledge of anything medical, hauled me up and literally threw me into the back of an ambulance, and I bled all over the white sheets of the gurney I sat on since nobody thought to tend to my wounds. The whole ride, my mother got to watch in horror, my life bleeding out from my wrists. I did that to her.

At the hospital, I was restrained in a lovely white form-fitting jacket that wrapped my arms fully around my body and I was labeled insane.

The people I met in that hospital made everything worse for me, because I knew I wasn’t like them. I was touched by violence. There was no chemical imbalance in my head, no malfunction in my cerebral cortex, but no one understood this… They all thought I was mad just like before. The other kids in that asylum were terrifying, constantly listening and arguing with the shouting voices they heard in their skulls.

Jesus told me to kill my dog!

Yes! He did!

My dog told me to kill my teacher!

Yes! I fancy the idea too!

An alien from the planet 971 in the Garfilplex Galaxy offered me a million shiny golden stars if I slit my wrists.

Pass me the razor!

You could see the madness and chaos when you looked in their bouncy nervous irises. That was where I learned to watch people, read the body language of everyone around me, learn their innermost thoughts and their next moves. You just needed to recognize the tightness in the skin around their eyes and the tension that coiled the muscles of their faces when they were about to have an episode, because their voices became too loud for them to handle. Or watch the corners of the lips of the nurses and the way they moved their fingers before deciding to inject you with syringes filled with brain-to-broccoli-induced-crap. I lived there for three months until my mother finally understood that I wasn’t insane, packed Dylan and me up, and left the country.