Care For Me Not, I'll Hurt You Too Much

You ran quickly from that house. You ran quickly from that boy. Correction, that demon that now knew too much about you. He nearly knew everything. He was too close, he was too knowledgeable of your scars. Why did fate choose this punishment?

All your fears of your father left your thoughts as you bolted across the lawn. You didn’t care about the cold, you didn’t care that you were crying. You just care about getting away. The door was surprisingly unlocked as you ran through it. If your father was there, he must not have had time to get up from wherever he was hiding to come and kick your ass, because you were up the stairs so fast that by the time you got to the top, your head was spinning and your legs hurt so badly the only thing you could do was let the tears flow down your cheeks.

You ran to your room and shut the door as quickly as possible. Locking it as soon as it clicked. You barely made it the rest of your way to your bed. As soon as you did though, you collapsed. You fell onto it, not caring how much pain you were putting yourself through. You just didn’t want to believe that your life was now this fucked up.

Comfort was a long way off though. Through the small crack of your window, you heard Gerard outside calling your name. You were hoping to all the Gods you could think of that he hadn’t seen you run into your house, and that he was just standing on the lawn, shouting your name into the darkness. The sound of his voice made you sick. It made you want to shout and scream, but you knew that if you did that now, then if he didn’t know where you were before, he would know then. You kept quiet, swallowing the bile rising in your throat, leaving the acid lingering menacingly in your throat.

You covered your head with the pillow and actually broke down. You curled yourself up into a ball on your bedspread and clutched the pillow tighter to your head. You body shook with sobs as your chest heaved with extreme pain and difficulty to allow the sharp, deep breaths you were taking to be let into your lungs. Your fingers gripped the pillow so tightly you were sure your knuckles were white, but you didn’t care. You cared about nothing now. You hated your life. You couldn’t stand anything anymore.

You don’t know when Gerard stopped shouting your name. You don’t know what time it was that you finally stopped crying. You don’t know if your father was home and heard you. You don’t know why you allowed yourself to live for so long. From what you had experienced, you should have ended it a long time ago. You should have taken too many pain killers. You should have stayed under the water in your bath too long. You should have jumped from the bridge. Yet you didn’t know why.

You have to deal love. It’s shit, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. Her voice echoes through your head. The tone, the words, the sympathy, it was all perfect. It was all hers.

That’s why. She’s just here to remind you that you’resupposed to suffer. Why? She never got the chance to tell you.

You lean out of bed and dig underneath the abandoned sweatshirt underneath your bed. Underneath this forgotten piece of clothing, you find the pill bottle you were looking for. The painkillers taunt you through the orange plastic bottle from the hospital. You still had a lot left over, because you hardly got the chance to take them. You decided instead to save them for emergencies. Like now. Even moving your finger was painful.

You cursed the childproofing cap as you struggled with the bottle and your wrist at the same time. The frustration built up inside you, and before you knew it, you were crying again. You didn’t care though. You just let it happen. You didn’t even know what you were crying about. Your eyes felt tight as your eyes pushed out the tears. This didn’t help, because it made the bruise surrounding your eye sting, sending the pain through the bridge of your nose and into your skull. You simply tried to ignore it though. You wiped away the tears running down your cheeks and went for the bottle again. You just wanted the pain to go away.

You finally got the bottle off and immediately swallowed three pills dry. It hurt going down your throat, and brought back up the acid as they traveled down your esophagus. Great, now even taking pills hurts.

You screw on the lid to the bottle again and are just about to replace them back in their hiding spot when you remember your thoughts from earlier. You should have taken too many pain killers.

The bottle rests easily in your hand. It seems so light compared to the weight of any of your limbs. You stare at it, wondering what it would be like. Who would find you first? Who would be the first to know you were gone?

Would it be your father? He would eventually be wondering where his punching bag had gone to, but maybe he’d just sign you off as dead and leave you be until someone else decided to look for you. Or at least until your corpse started to smell.

Would it be Michaels? She was one of the only other people in your life that sort of cared about you. She would eventually notice that you were missing from school, but she might just write it off as an absence and wait for you to come back, just like the last time you had ended up in the hospital.

Would it be Gerard? He doesn’t even know where you live, but after seeing you tonight like this, he might become worried if you didn’t show up for quite a while. Then again he was your neighbor now, and that smaller boy that you saw was probably his younger brother or something. He has a family, and they just moved here. Hell of a way to say ‘Welcome to the Neighborhood’.

You estimate a week or two before someone would find you. And that would be only because your father wouldn’t be able to handle the smell of a decaying body in his house any longer. Then again, he wouldn’t really seem like he’d come in to check on you. You knew he had a little bit of morals left in him, because he never touched you in any other way than when he beat the shit out of you, and because he’d actually put you back into you room after you had passed out. But he might not even come in and ‘check to see if you were okay.’ He could just leave if he couldn’t stand the smell. Then your body would be lying there for longer.

After that it probably wouldn’t be until the school discovered all your absences and tried to notify you that if you didn’t show up then you’d fail all your classes. But they might just send a letter. You didn’t have any other family to worry about you except for your father, and you didn’t even know if he worried about you or not. More than likely Michaels would be the victim. She would notice you were missing and, in all her humbleness, find out your address from the front office and come over to see if you were feeling alright enough to come back to school. When she comes to the house and discovers it’s locked and no one answers because one of the owners left the state and the one she’s looking for is dead in the bedroom from an overdose…she’ll turn and leave, giving up on you like everyone else.

You sigh defeated and place the plastic bottle back under your bed and wrap it up in the old sweater. This is the way it’s supposed to be. You couldn’t imagine all your precious possessions being corrupted with the smell of your own decaying corpse. Even though you now hated everything about your life, you couldn’t taint your childhood home like that. After going through something like that, they might not be able to get the smell out and just end up demolishing the house. Then all memories of you would be erased completely, except for your school record of course.

Besides, you already put the lid back on the bottle. You didn’t want to go through the hell of trying to get that thing off and nearly fracturing your wrist at the same time.

You roll over onto your side, and catch a glimpse of the light in the next door window coming on through the crack letting the light shine through the window to dance on your wall. You close your eyes. Tonight could be considered one of the worst nights of your life. Right up there with all three accidents and the days to follow.

You wondered what Gerard was going to say or do the next time you saw him. That was him you saw walking across the lawn carrying the box. You now confirmed it. That wasn’t some hallucination a couple of nights ago, it was really him that you saw. It was also him that you heard talking with that boy that night they moved in. You just wonder how long you can keep it from him that you live next door too.

You slipped into a coma-like sleep with one last thought running through your head. Thank God it’s Friday.