Pain

• Elizabeth Knowles, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2013

Pain eats at you, calling you in closer, making you feel less alive. You just don’t want to live anymore knowing that everything you do is bad, wrong. You need to let yourself feel the pain that is eating you from the inside out. You need to see the trickling of the blood running down your wrists to know that what you feel inside is worth it. Watching the skin split open as you etch away at it making it loosen and thin, piercing it slowly, feeling more pain with every second and yet you don’t stop. When the blood trickles out slowly and you realise what you have done you still don’t stop because once you start, you can’t live with yourself knowing what you have done.
More blood falls, so do more tears. Head starts to throb as the carpet turns red. Vision blurs and pain increases dramatically as you hit an artery, the main source of life. You drop the knife onto the floor and lay their watching yourself slowly slipping away. The pain starts to ease, but the blood still continues to flow forming a pool; a pool of misery and despair; of hopes and dreams; of life.
With every drop that falls, every life form that leaves your body, your pain starts to lift slightly. Everything you have ever felt that made you bring the blade back and forth across your wrist falls away and suddenly you are lightened and the world is better. All the bad is gone and you can only see the good; the happy; the love; the laughter. You realise that the bad was blurring your vision and behind that was a world where you were loved and cared and there was a place for happiness.
But you are too late. The blood continues to fall and you are already drifting away; forgetting who you are; forgetting your past; forgetting your future; but never forgetting what you have done.
The beating slows, air constricts, light fades; the pain stops and the world ceases to exist.