Life By Taylor Whitehouse
Celine gets up from her laptop resting on her desk with blurred vision, almost seeming as if she’s wearing foggy glasses. Her eyelids weighed down from the tears that are longing to be set free. She stumbles over to her cupboard opening several drawers, coming to the last one. She reaches her hand in, gripping onto and pulling out a knife. Staring at it, Celine slowly makes her way to the bathroom closes and locks the door, and collapses into a heap, dropping the knife next to her.
Sitting on the bathroom floor, she [footnoteRef:1]weeps buckets of tears thinking about loneliness. Such a dark place. It can make anyone feel like they’re in a room with one thousand people but being invisible to every one of them. Every single day for as long as Celine can remember, waking up knowing that she’s going to spend all day by herself once again has been the hardest part. Darkness. This word fashioned only to describe the emptiness of another. People say that darkness brings nothing but despair, although for Celine it doesn’t. Darkness is cold, unfeeling, passionless; but it is the closest thing she has to a friend. Its warmth enriches her with the affection essential for the rebuilding of her happiness only to be broken down by her loneliness. All of her senses suddenly become heightened as she begins to hear the emptiness of the room in which she’s sitting in. Her eyes like curtains as they slowly open wider and wider to the tiled floors and the creamy pigment of paint etched on the bathroom walls surrounding her. The icy tiles of the floor send chills through her, with the room deprived of colour and decoration almost imitating the loneliness she constantly feels. The window looking out at the moribund [footnoteRef:2]autumn trees swaying in the cool breeze. [1: Metaphor ] [2: Season of “The Road Not Taken”]
She picks up the knife with shaky hands and tears running down her soft, rosy cheeks, longing to feel anything but the excruciating emotional pain she’s been dealing with for her whole life. The knife trails across her left wrist while she’s groaning in agony and quivering. She then switches and does the same to her right, drops the knife and lays her blood-splattered arms to rest.
Hearing the screams, Celine’s mother, Kathrine, sprints upstairs, repeatedly screaming “Celine!! Honey are you okay? Let me in!” while turning the locked door handle back and forth frantically trying to manoeuvre her way in. Failing to do so, she grabs the closest chair and recklessly swings it as hard and fast as she can, smashing a hole about the size of an apple into the door. She pounds at the rigid sides of the hole, gradually making it big enough for her to writhe her way through, only to find a scarlet collage of blood and pale skin. She heaves at the sight of her dead daughter, with solvent leftovers from her ham and cheese sandwich from lunch splattering everywhere, mixing in with the blood already pooled on the floor. Kathrine stands there, as still as a statue, completely traumatised at the scene. [footnoteRef:3]The blood ceases to ooze from her wrists, enforcing a motionless silence to the pool of blood, so still Katherine can see her own reflection in it, failing to desiccate. The pearl shaped tears tumble down her face, leaving no mark or smear on her cheek. The mascara engrosses itself into the tears that burst out of her eyes. Her legs begin to tremble, and she crumbles down next to Celine, and in the circumstances was unconcerned that she was sitting in the mixture of blood and vomit. [3: Imagery ]
She begins hysterically crying, with her screaming sobs only intersected by her need to inhale. Celine, laying there looks uneasy somehow, while Kathrine’s tears spill down puddling onto her. She reaches for Celine’s wide opened eyes, covering and closing them to put her to sleep so that she can rest in peace once and for all.
Kathrine closes her eyes, seeing Celine as a baby. So innocent and gorgeous with no problems in the world and her whole life still ahead of her. Well, at least that’s what she thought back then. Tears shed from baby Celine but about the most miniscule problems like being tired or wanting some milk while her mother rocks her back and forth in her arms trying to hush her.
In the faint background of Kathrine’s cries, she hears sirens wailing, and she’s horrified to realise that they’re too late.
