Prologue - To Be Loved (TW In depth SH)

I am unlovable.

I have this thought daily, it comes up in my mind as I hold the sharp end of a razor blade to my thigh. It slices through flesh too slowly, making the pain almost unbearable, but I want to savor the feeling. 

I watch the trickles of blood rise to the surface of my skin. Slowly the top of my thigh becomes red, as it bleeds to the other cuts made. 

The pain is almost numbing, in a way. It keeps my focus off the dark thoughts that seep into my mind every waking moment. For me, this is my one second of peace. When I am not in my bedroom slicing through flesh, my brain grasps onto distant memories through calloused fingers, holding onto the mementos of the past so tightly it cuts through my skin. My blood soaks through the memories that I once found comfort in, now they lie in a pool of my own self-doubt. 

It is currently September 17, 2016. My alarm clicks as the time turns to 1:04 in the morning. I sit at the edge of my bed, my pants rolled down to my ankles as my blood flows down my knee. I try wiping it quickly with the toilet paper I brought from the bathroom.

My house is quiet and cold. My roommate Samantha fell asleep hours ago. Her snores were so small that they almost made for good white noise.  

Looking around my room brings no comfort to me now, no pictures of friends or academic achievements. I never finished high school. I was supposed to graduate a few years ago, but my mother got sick and I had to leave. I remember the look on my friend’s faces when I told them, it was total betrayal. We had our whole lives planned out together, and they thought I was abandoning them for my dying mom. Maybe in a way, I was. There was a moment in elementary school when we pinky promised to live together and go to the same college together. The rosiness in our cheeks, our fat and tiny pinky fingers all intertwined in a group of 4, and here I was, breaking that promise a year before we were supposed to act on it. 

Sometimes I stalk their Instagram profiles, wondering what they're up to now—wondering if I tore them apart from their promise. But I didn’t. They don’t live with each other but go to the same University and hang out daily. 

Do they ever think of me?

Do they look at my profile like I stalk theirs?

Mine doesn’t reveal a whole lot. I don’t take selfies or late-night party pictures. My last post was about my mother's funeral, which was almost a year ago now. 

Oh, my mother. How I miss her scent and how her crow's feet came out when she laughed. I miss the late-night ice cream drives and how she held me when I cried. 

Knowing the fact that she will never gently wake me up for school again makes me want to dig this razor deeper into my thigh. I grieve for the parents I have lost. She was like my mother and father at the same time. My hero. My savior. 

And now she’s dead.

If my roommate weren’t here, I would scream at the top of my lungs. I scream to release the anger of feeling like an orphan, I scream to release the loneliness that I attained when I left high school. 

I decided to get up. I finish wiping the blood off myself and pull up my sweatpants. I tiptoe back to the bathroom to put the toilet paper back, hoping Sam wouldn’t wake up to the sound of me creaking down the hall. I spot myself in the bathroom mirror before I leave. My eyebags are a deep purple, they sink into my face like quicksand. My brown hair is short, I tried cutting it into a pixie cut to keep it out of my face, but I'm not a professional. It’s uneven on both sides and looks like a mess from not brushing it. My baggy clothes are covered in cat fur, no doubt from Sam’s cat Sushi. 

“Oh Delilah,” I whisper to myself, my full name is never used unless I was in trouble as a little girl. My mother would count to 3 when I wouldn’t come inside, threatening to throw my toys away if I didn’t follow her rules. 

I hated rules. 

I turn away from the mirror, heading back into the hallway with quiet steps. Instead of going back to my bedroom, I walk the opposite way to the living room. It’s dark outside, the only light illuminated by the street lamps, which puts an eerie glow on the sidewalk. With it being so close to Halloween, I wouldn’t want to risk going outside at this time of night. I had seen on the news that there was a killer clown epidemic, people dressing up and scaring others. I didn’t want to risk being spotted by one. 

The rest of the house was small and cluttered. Sam hated being organized I found, and opted to throw her things on the floor or table instead of putting them away. The complete opposite of me. 

The walls are lined with a few photos, mostly of Samantha and her family, but some paintings that I had bought from farmers markets as well. I enjoyed having some color in the house, it made it feel more real. 

The kitchen was the one place I could keep clean, mostly because the counters were so small that Sam couldn’t fit anything on them. I always have the dishes washed and put away, with no spills or messes on any surface. I keep it pristine, it shines like a diamond at me in the moonlight. 

Standing here, in the middle of the living room, with the kitchen to my left and the front door to my right, I pause. My thigh aches from the damage I have put it under, and my heart hangs heavy with the thoughts of my mother. My breath calls her name, begging her to come home. I ask God every second to wake me up from this nightmare that we call life.