Chapter 200 : The cupboard on the right

Esmee

Mi was sedated to try and help stop her  convulsions and then sent up to the ward. There had been a brief conversation about sending her to intensive care but in the end it was decided that the ward would have been better for her. I had with the help of another female nurse washed the sick and charcoal off of her skin and maneuvered her rag doll sedated like body into a hospital gown before she was wheeled away. Emmet and I left the hospital and headed home. Mia was going to stay with my mother overnight so we had the house to our self but none of us felt like doing anything. We went to bed at eleven and by half past Emmet was sleeping. I on the other hand could not. The day we had all just endured was racing through my mind without any signs of slowing and all my emotions bubbled somewhere uncomfortably just under my skin. What was wrong with me? Why had Mi’s suicide attempt sat so uncomfortably with me? In fairness I was never over the moon when anybody tried to kill them self’s but it had been a while since it affected me quite so much. It was a sad fact but true that most kids who entered Apple gate house had considered suicide. On average one in two had attempted it in some way and more times then I could count I had found myself as an A&E Chaperone for them and It had always been OK. but I had felt it for a while now, had known it since the first day I saw her. There was something different about Mi that made me see myself in her and it had been ages since I was forced to remember my overdosing days. Maybe I was too over involved with MI but a part of me just didn’t care. I wanted to look after her, she deserved it. Some would call me unprofessional and maybe it was all true. Maybe I cause this pain. My head hurt, my body ached and my soul boiled over, however I knew how to make the pain go away.

Silently I crept out of bed and wondered down the stairs into the kitchen flicking the light switch before squinting away from the intense bright light. Most would have made a cup of tea and on most night I would have too, it was rare these days that I headed for the top right cupboard that hung above the sink but I had been considering it for days now. The need to once again venture there building somewhere under my skin, carried around by my heart and on my pulse making me sting all over.

 Trying to make my breathing stay calmed and in tune I reached up as far as I could on tiptoes and curled my fingers around the cold metal edge of the same trinket box I had owned since I was a teenager. I had always loved this box, the sight of its delicate paintings of butterfly’s had always made me smile. The box in fact I had often thought was too pretty for what it was used for but it’s importance stood out to me through many things. I had once used this box daily, maybe a few times a day, now it was much less than. Months passed in its absence and I barely noticed it was missing but slowly it singed for me across the distance and I followed it back to its dark cupboard on the right, the one no one ever really mentioned or saw but new it was there. Like a void.

 I opened the box slowly and took out what I was searching for placing it on the table in front of me. The silver edge glinting up. These had always been my favorite from my teenage years, but back then I had never been fussy what I used. Now I was.  I bought what I needed myself when I visited the supermarket. I threw them in the trolley and paid for them without thinking too much what they were for and hid them in the box, kidding myself that  this time I wouldn’t use them but I was never that strong I would always run backwards towards them and I would always end up buying more.

 I shifted in my seat and pulled my PJ trousers down and kicked them off of my feet.  I took up the double edged blade and posed it in my fingers. I had promised that the last time was going to be my last and the time before that and the time before that and for a while when I was strong I thought it was going to be. I had lasted a long time now, a new record for me, over two years. I hadn’t cut since Mia had been in our lives. I had planned to never again, but the addiction to the blade and the blood was like poison and it flowed in my very being, pulsed somewhere under the skin and I fell into it. I wanted to sob for my years I would waste but I could not get the tears to come and without any choice at all I pushed the steal edge into my skin and hissed as I opened up my thighs.