Something I Could Hold Onto

A sixteen-year-old Frank Iero kneels before a motel toilet, clutching painfully at his ribs as acidic yellow bile rises to his throat. He coughs and splutters as the ghosts of times past grasp his innards with revoltingly cold hands. Shudders rack his frail body, then convulsing sobs - he collapses on the cold linoleum floor in one broken ticking of the increasingly ominous clock. As the sweat from his perpetually-knotted brow makes cool contact with the peeling tiles below, more thoughts begin to race through Frank's ever-tiring mind: flooded lungs, open graves, empty bottles, vacant eyes -

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

He inhales a shaky breath, letting it out slowly and running a lacerated hand down his pale torso. Frank winces as the small cuts decorating his knuckles become aggravated by the friction and pulls his wounded fingers to his lips, sucking gently on the bloodied extremity. With an unsteady sigh, he allows his eyes to slip shut and block the harsh glare of the bathroom lights, the fluorescent glow illuminating his face as it had so many faces before. The veins in his palm pump furiously away, oozing more of the thick liquid into the humid air and creating an unpleasant and steady throbbing.

Images instantly paint themselves behind his eyelids, stock still portraits of sober rage. He sees himself hours before, tears like bleach rolling gracefully down his flustered cheeks. The boy watches his reflection with extreme focus, memorizing and re-memorizing the crimson lines that contrast so starkly with the green of his irises. He studies the swollen rims of his lids, noticing how his dark lashes have clumped and plastered themselves to the now-purple skin below. His hair is disheveled and dirty, a week's worth of grease assembling atop his crown. The plump pink lips that had once been stained with a smile now lay unnaturally still, the corners seemingly sewn to his jaw in a permanent frown.

The more he looks, the more disgusted he becomes.

With more haste than his tired body is accustomed to, he steps away from the looking glass and pulls his arm behind his shoulder.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

His knuckles go white as fingers clench into a visual representation of his tortured psyche.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

A silence fills his ears as Frank watches himself force his fist into the mirror, shards of the mocking vanity falling into the reddening sink and floor below, all in one shattered heartbeat. He crumples then, the last pantomime of company laying in pieces on the floor.

Franks stares for a minute, his grief-ridden and anger-addled mind slurring his thoughts into a whirlwind of convolution, faster, faster, faster still until his head feels as though it will erupt in a flurry of confusion and he can't handle the thought, and the room gets hotter, and smaller, and he can only think to salvage relief through an amber bottle of amber poison some lost soul left in the bedside table beside the Bible. His trembling hands tear at the cap until it, too, is sitting patiently on the floor, the booze burning his esophagus but in a way that brings relief as opposed to pleasure. His mind calms a little more after each gulp, and his thoughts thaw a little more after each choking splutter until his blood mixes with alcohol and the bones in his legs turn to rubber. Soon, he is laying on the floor adjacent to the glass and aluminum cap, his blurry-vision focusing on the shard next to him, making eye contact with his reflection, and everything fades to black.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.