Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa

Rain pulsed down the only window in the room, streaking the outside world with tears from God. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt something, and the rain reflected her insides pretty well. Cold, lonely, and wet from the tears that she hadn’t shed. It wouldn’t be surprising in, since her eyes remained dry, her tears built up and drenched her bones in salt water.
She sat against the wall opposite the window, just staring out at the world through that clear glass rectangle. It was a depressing sight, but inside the room wasn’t any better. Beer and water leakage stained the off white walls and the carpet was this and ratty with bare patches of wooden boards showing. The bed was a mattress on the floor; she’d broken her bed frame years ago. The only thing that showed intelligent like dwelled there was the marker and paint on the walls. Words were scribbled haphazardly, most of them angry slashes from when she was drunk.
Her eyes fixed to one line of writing above her bed. Drop the dagger and lather the blood on your hands, Romeo. She smiled, her chapped lips cracking. It was her favorite line she had painted in her room. She loved blood, and the words fit her perfectly. At the thought she looked down. Scars littered her arms, wrist to biceps in uniform lines like soldiers. More of the same were on her calves and the tops of her thighs. Yes, she thought, daggers and blood fit her very well.
Her body was littered with the scars of her emotions; straight while she was sober and crooked when she was drunk or high. There were no emotions anymore, though. She only felt something when a blade was dragging across her skin and that was a dim fascination at best. Nothing else could break through the walls around her anymore. Physically she was thin and brittle, too many drugs pushed into her system and too many boys pushed into her body. Sixteen years was too long.
Life hadn’t really started until she was four, when her father had left her with scars no little girl should have had to bear. He’d left not long after that. If putting a bullet through your head could be counted as leaving. There wasn’t much else to say, really. Life began and ended with that one event. She’d let herself go to waste much like her mother, except she had never let herself become pregnant. Enough common sense remained to know that she had to spare a baby the trauma of living like this. She smiled a bit to herself in congratulations, just the faintest curing upwards of her lips.
She’d become famous in back alleys for that smile. People called her Mona Lisa for the pensive expression she always wore. She took the name for her own; she couldn’t even remember the one that her mother had given her. She’d been called ‘girl’ for so many years that her real name had been lost to her memory with other things best left alone.
The sound of the rain brought Mona out of her thoughts, and again she wondered what her insides felt like. If they were steeping in tears or just bone dry and turned to powder like the rest of her felt. She smiled a little wider at her poetic thoughts. In another life she might have been a poet or a writer. Maybe she would have gone on to college and made something of herself and thus would not be sitting here in this room, with these intentions.
Her smile faded. Not that it mattered now. Nothing mattered anymore, because he mind had been made up. No one would remember the girl called Mona Lisa for being a great writer or poet or anything but a quiet girl who let anyone do anything they wanted with her. No one would remember her because she was going to die. Not by a disease or an accident or her own abusive meth addicted mother, but by her own hand. Her own choice.
It was the first choice she’d made in a long while, and the only one that didn’t set her heart racing and her gut clenching in primal terror. The thought was so final, just like the word. Suicide. It was the last option for so many, disgraced by others. People like her were called to give up the idea and strive to lead happier lives. They just didn’t understand that sometimes going away was what made you the happiest.
Take her father, for instant. He’d assaulted his daughter in a drunken stupor, and when he’d woken up and realized what he’d done, killing himself had made him happier than the thought of living with the consequences and the guilt.
Just the idea of never feeling anything again made her body buzz with something close to happiness. While the rain poured down outside-maybe it was already God crying for her-she took a razor from her pocket and looked down at it. Laid flat in her pal, it shimmered bright silver with promise and sympathy. The razor understood her pain, opened its white-light arms and cooed softly that everything would be alright in the end.
Maybe things would be better for others when she left, too. Maybe her mother would magically sober up, go to rehab, and tell people about what and complete and utter mess she’d been for eighteen years. Encourage children to not end up like her daughter.
Yes, Mona thought, she could live-or rather die-with the thought of her mother possibly getting her shit together. And if she didn’t at least the girl wouldn’t have to deal with it. This thought stuck firmly in mind, the young woman stood. She removed her hoodie, shivering a bit in the cool room, and folded it before setting the clothing on the floor. Next came her t shirt and jeans, both folded with her boots beside them. No one could ever say she had been a sloppy suicide.
Sitting back against the wall again in just her underwear, she sat cross legged and took up her silver friend. He was calling louder now, an insistent lover, and she imagined that the sharpened blade was rather thirsty for her blood. She didn’t want the poor thing to be starved of sustenance.
Placing the blade against her skin she pressed down on the inside of her wrist and dragged upwards to the crook of her elbow. A thin line appeared, defined for a brief second, before it began to well up and overflow with blood. Pain sparked and blossomed, as acute as pleasure. She had cut deep, severing the vein. Mona did the same to the other arm and then looked down at her legs. Things were already beginning to grow fuzzy around the edges. She was so small it wouldn’t take long, and she decided to speed the process while she still could by finding the veins on the insides of her thighs and greeting them with the blade as well.
The kiss of metal made her body sing as it had done for years and she leaned back happily. It hurt, but in such a good way that it was better than any other options in her eyes. The blade found a resting place on her knee, and she let her eyes find that one line of song as blood dripped and found its way to the floor. “Drop the dagger and lather the blood on your hands, Romeo.” She whispered in a voice hoarse from misuse. Well, she hadn’t used a dagger, but she twitched her knee to let the razor fall to the floor and weakly raised her hand to catch several drops of blood on her fingers. Warm and almost soft, she let it run over her skin.
A red halo began forming around her on the floor, thoughts beginning to go fuzzy and blank, and she smiled. Not a smirk, but a full, bright, happy smile. She hadn’t smiled like this since she was a little girl and it made her facial muscles ache with the strain of her joy. Not even five minutes passed before she felt her eyes slipping closed and her body growing exhausted. Breathing slowed and she could feel her heartbeat slowing as well. It wouldn’t be long now before she was free. She opened her eyes again, this time to look out the window at the water coursing down the glass. Too bad she couldn’t feel it on her skin, she thought distantly. There had been a boy, a long while ago, who had taken her out once to dance in the rain. She couldn’t remember his name, but she could remember the feeling of the rain on her cool skin.
The sound of the rain lulled her to sleep, and she was happy knowing that she would never have to wake up. As her eyelids slipped shut, shielding pale blue eyes from the world, the rain began to peter off. The storm was moving elsewhere. A boom of thunder rattled the glass in the window, but she didn’t hear it and her body didn’t stir. It was the end of the girl called Mona Lisa, and she was finally, truly, happy.
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