Bad things happen to me often. A bit of a lighting rod for poor unfortunate decisions and even more unfortunate results. Stay out a little bit too late and witness a crime unfold in front of my eyes. Drive the highway at odd hours of the night and get trapped in a police blockade. Go out with the boy I like only to realize my heart doesn’t beat. But even a black cat gets nine lives; so why not I.
It was an evening of the Halloween season and I knew it would cost me my life. This one was bad in a way I knew I wouldn’t return from; yet, I fear I’d lost all sense of self-preservation. I’d slit my wrists lengthwise right then if I’d known how to make it happen. Oh no, that’s a joke. Haha! I’d never do that. I’d rather go out, and have someone beautiful do it for me. Oh! Isn’t that so cowardly.
So it’s true, I am telling this story from the afterlife. But don’t get too excited; it doesn’t actually exist. They just sometimes make exceptions for those truly pathetic souls that slither by the feet of Hades; so gruesome their deaths and so weak were their existences that it draws pity from the Lord of the Underworld himself. Scum of the earth and barely worth the shapeless matter of a ghostly afterlife, he curses them another voice. The damned are rarely ever so unlucky.
On that evening of the Halloween season, I stepped out of a car alone and into a dark room with music so loud no one could hear me scream whenever it’d come time. It was the lack of light, the immersed atmosphere, and the couple having sex against the wall in the back that reassured me tonight was the night. So I climbed. Each step, up each stair, one at a time. I traced my finger against the wooden rail, letting it drag behind my body as my legs took me forward and up. The tips of my nails dug into the grain as I begged for life. “Don’t let these steps end,” I cried as I lunged forward. The man passing me stared at my chest as he went. I reached the balcony of this theater now, the art deco molding welcoming an outdated me. The exit sign glowed a bright and eerie red. Halloween red. Shining so vibrantly, I swore I could hear the buzz of its incandescent halogen light. I walked now as a moth to its glow and pushed with my full weight against the bar as a wave of the night air filled my lungs. That crisp intensity of a shock to the system.
“Now this is what life is all about!”
Up on the roof of this theater, with the bass of the party below ringing through the balls of my feet, I looked at the few who had gathered at this height before me. Sneaking a smoke, kissing a stranger, and looking off into the city skyline, we were all barely there. But I think they’re different from me. They don’t hear the words I think.
I walked closer to the edge of the building now. Fear began to creep into my eyes. How splendid! An immune system to fight off a summer sniffle and life threatening ambivalence. What an utterly animalistic nature to be instinctive. Though, I can’t say this is ambivalence. Less is it possible to care so intensely, your fingers grow numb so you can no longer feel your heart even when you push through your bone and squeeze. I once tried to fit my fingers through a cut on my ribcage. I pried at the flesh as pools of warm blood dripped into my palm and down my arms. Pressure built against my heart as I suffocated on my thoughts till I finally lurched forward and threw up. Dry heaving from my days without food, I caved to the insistent need to breathe. I knew I was damned then, clearer than I knew my own name. That scarred nicely against my chest.
A gush of wind pulled me up to the ledge now.
“Woah there, you wouldn’t want to fall now would you.”
A cheeky participant must’ve noted from somewhere beside me. I locked eyes with the faceless comment. They reached a hand out to me. As I reached to meet it, my numb fingers felt a cold surface. Feeling, the noun, now betrayed by a glass fetched from the bar below of all things. I couldn’t help it. I keeled over and laughed. It was a vicious laughter, menacing and hurtful. Belly full and brutal, it was painful to let out and terrifying to hear.
“I’m California sober!” I belted into the night air and off I stepped into the cold air of life. The crispness meeting the cavities of my chest as the gravity of my decision fell down against my lifeless body. How I would’ve loved to see the sight. Crushed beneath my own imagination. My head split open like a pumpkin that never survived the Halloween season.
Hades nearly slipped on my spirit that night. He would go on to complain to Persephone of the neediest newest soul he’d collected. He'd kiss her shackled wrists and promised her an eternity the soul of mine would never know. She’d cry. Not for me, but her own damned life instead.