Angel of Suicides

From Wrichacir

In retrospect, love is not at all like a song would have you believe.

Songs are neat, orderly things and, well, love is anything but.

Love has all the vibrancy and chaos of life, it's as much a living thing as it is an emotion. Sometimes, it might be as beautiful as a songbird, as enduring as a stallion. From what I've seen, it's more often like a tiger, ready to eat you whole at the first mis-step.

The girl sprawled on the floor of the dingy public rest-room, her skin pale against the grimy, green tiles and almost glowing beneath the light of the flickering fluorescents. Tears had streaked her too-thick mascara, and her hair – which, I noted with a sort of clinical detachment, was a decidedly unnatural shade of blue-green usually reserved for big-eyed Japanese cartoon characters – was in disarray. She had a bottle of pills in one hand, and a straight razor in the other.

The girl apparently liked her options.

I sat next to her, curling my nose slightly at the acrid, nitrogen smell of urine. She was still sobbing; huge, hitching gasps that ended in a sound so mournful that it could only be called a wail, so I don't think she heard me. I liked sobs, sobs were good. It was when they got quiet that you have to worry.

“So, who was he?” I kept my voice soft, steady and calm. She still jumped at the sound of my voice and looked up, shocked. Her eyes were the same colour as her hair, and glistened with a sheen of tears. I couldn't help thinking that her smeared mascara made her look like a raccoon. I bit my lip to keep from laughing.

“What're you talking about?” she snapped, or tried to between hitched breaths.

“People only sit in bathrooms and think about killing themselves when there's love involved,”

She started crying again, and I let her. I counted to ten about fifteen times before she calmed down enough to talk again.

“His name was Jimmy,”

“Jimmy, huh? What'd Jimmy do?”

She laughed bitterly “Me”

“Let me guess...now you've got little Jimmy?”

“Not anymore, but...I just feel so empty inside. I woke up this morning and just started crying, and I've been like that since..” she trailed off for a moment, got quiet. “I just don't know what to do,”

I thought about it for a moment. I had replayed this moment so many times, but every answer I could give her just fell flat. Love isn't a song, you can't read the notes, memorize the lyrics and understand it all at once.

She was looking down again, at the razor.

“There're about a hundred things to say to someone who's going to kill themselves – things to try to stop them, things to calm them down. I've just gone over most of them in my head, but you've already made your decision,”

She nodded, trembling, but a brief moment of confusion flickered across her face “You're not here to try to stop me?”

“No,” I put my arm around her shoulder “But I can sit with you a while, if you'd like..”

She sniffled and looked down at the knife once again. “That would be nice,”

Then, she grew quiet.

They always do.