"I walked past her and took the first of the Vicodins, scooping water from the faucet. I went down to my room without saying a word, closed the door, and lay on my bed. In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? I thought of the girl with the scar tattoos at the Crenshaw group home. She was right, it should bloody well show."
She had waited until her husband and children were far away, and had driven into the snowy woods, and ended it. Just let it all go.
She had wanted the pain to stop. The heart-hurt. She slept her way into death, only waking when the Highway Patrol found her body.
She was cold, rigid, frozen, when they found her.
Someone like that, said the patrolwoman. You'd think she'd have everything to live for.
She tried to speak, to tell them that that was what made the pain unbearable but, like someone caught in a bad dream, she could not make herself heard. She screamed, and no sound came out. She watched as they took her body away.
She sat by the side of the road, in the snow, all bodiless and afraid, waiting for the happiness to start.
“I try to make new friends, but I don’t know how it works. I was such a recluse for so long. I took Prozac, and it worked for a year, and then it stopped. I think I did more that year, but I lost it.” He looked at me curiously. He was sad and sweet-natured and intelligent – clearly a lovely person, as someone said to him that evening – but he was gone. “How do you meet people, besides here?” And before I could answer, he added, “And once you’ve met them, what do you talk about?”
