My heart’s pounding to the beat of the song in my head. It sings of pain, of loss, of death. Screaming, crying, dying. My mind is flowing, meaninglessly, not absorbing the actions i’m taking, only knowing the song. Just the song. Nothing else. Focus on the song. I can’t breathe, I can’t think; one wrong sentence, word, syllable, and on the other side of the phone the blade will slice through innocent skin. I just keep talking.

The song changes; hope, happiness, tinged with loss. I talk of the future. A lighthouse, I say, a lighthouse on the bank of the ocean. In Maine. Don’t you like the rain, love, don’t you like the little raindrops?

I try to make my voice the rain. I try to make it into the laughter of little babies, I try to make it into our future, the sobs when we die. When we die...

No. My voice is not death. My voice cannot be sadness. But I can’t keep it out. Dark gray walls, a smoke, a mountain, presses against the rain. Furthur. No. Worse. No.

A tear falls from his face.

My voice cracks.

The walls crumble, shadows dancing this way and that. The smoke is breathed into my lungs, choking, suffocating, killing. The mountain explodes with the force of a million unsaid words.

The knife sinks closer.

I scream.

Why? We’re children. We’re fifteen. We’re distracted, cell phones and fake friends and fake drama, a movie screen playing the lives we wish to have, the ones we think we have. We don’t deserve love, we don’t deserve happiness. We’re lazy, uninspired. We deserve more tests, more discipline, more guns, more death. All we deserve is a fake life we’re shamed for. And it’s killing us. It’s killing me. It’s killing my only.

We’re sobbing now, I’m screaming for my baby to stop. I hear my voice, it sounds angry. Drum sets bash in my head. Thunder, over and over, on top of the crumbled, gray mountain. I try to calm it, make it into me, make it comforting. I don’t know what to do. The wind is pushing me aside, leaving only him, standing alone in a desert of salt.

I can see remnants of the gold in his eyes. He didn’t believe me when I told him, that they were the most beautiful I’d ever seen. He didn’t believe me when I said I was lost in them. I was lost in them for a long time. But the smoke crept through, stealing his light. I think I chased it away for a while. But then it came back, bringing his sadness and fakeness and scars back to me. But I’m still lost in them, and the smoke is suffocating.

My mind searches deeper. He needs to stop. He needs to stop. Please stop love, stay with me love, stop, PLEASE… I can’t, my words aren’t hitting him. The tall, gray walls are taking over. My words hit them, the countless, perfect syllables, made for him. If they could just get to him… He can’t hear me. He doesn’t want to. But he’s still staring at my body, at my face, through his tears, like it’s the last time. Maybe it is. The song changes, in my head.

And I know what to do. I know. I don’t want to. I have before. I don’t want it again. But I can’t let him die. I can’t hurt his skin. It’s my fault, its all my fault. And I can’t let him die.

I look at him one more time. The lips of countless kisses, on the forehead, on the cheek, on my own. All through my body, leaving countless tingles, sending shivers down my spine, or comfort into my mind. They were chapped and spitting words I hated, but I loved them. The nose he hates, the eyes, the hair. I stare into a face that’ll never see me the same.

And I stand up. I walk like a robot to the dresser. The drawer where I hid my regrets. I open it once more. All of this in an instant.

I’m holding it in my hand. It’s silver, dull, ridged. A shot through the air, mulled down by rugged edges and spots of red. My blood still stains the edge. My legs are exposed, open, vulnerable. I don’t want to look at the two little lines, the tiny betrayers of discoloration on my thighs. So I don’t. Its heavy, hard to open, harder to close. Rusted, old. I got it when I was 9. The song is slicing through my brain, cutting, snipping through my skin, bleeding my life onto the ground. I promised. I promised not to. But so did he.

We had sat cross-legged in the darkened basement, on the worn futon, staring at each other’s selfs. Holding nothing at all back. Completely merged. Together. And we sat cross-legged in that place, like that, and we cried, and he held his pinky finger out for mine. Just touching the tip. Just a bit of a promise. And then we latched onto each other, and those two fingers, that promise was all that was keeping us here. He kept me here. And he kissed my hand, and we lay down, and talked until 8 o’ clock.

Our fingers are broken. Our promise is just words now, a thin, spidery web holding our broken bodies together, us merged with a single thread stretching exactly 3.5 miles.

And when I held that knife to my chest, it sliced through the thread. His eyes no longer had gold in them. It’s all gone now. I’m sobbing, not thinking, but as he pressed harder into his skin, I pressed harder into mine.

Harder, deeper, more, more, more. I want to stop, I want to cry out. I want to stop! But he keeps going.

I don’t like this. I can see his eyes. He’s in pain. He’s feeling something. He truly is. My words mean nothing, but my body does.

And the knife falls from his hand, and from mine, and he sobs. We cry, and cry, so much. I was given love. I broke it. I wanna put it back together.

But instead I’ll cry, with him, spilling my tears instead of my blood. And I sleep like that, after we talk the night away, like we used to. And I can fix this. I can fix us. And he’ll help, because I know he wants me too. But for now, my eyelids close, and I let the gray take over.

But the knife is still on my bedspread.