Kill Yourself

Ashe Novella

There is a boy you used to know lying in your bed. He has a name, but you dare not say it. His breathing is labored, unsteady but holding on. He looks you in the eyes as you hold the cause to his grief—a knife, plunged straight into his chest.

You have decided to end his life.

He is bleeding onto your once white sheets. You pull the knife out, scared he’ll leave a stain you can’t rid yourself of, and the fountain of youth springs out from him, spraying red all around him. You try to stanch the bleeding, to hide his pain, but the damage has already been done. Any attempts to cover the wound only paints you in him. So instead, you grit your teeth, and begin to cut away at him.

You begin to slice off the parts of him neither of you ever liked—the boorish corners, the excess fat, the unnecessary muscle—the little things that remind you of what he isn’t. His tendons snap like untuned violin strings, and when you hit bone, you kick into the flesh and hear them crash like cymbals. He sings out cries of pain, creating a suffering symphony with only you and him as its adoring audience.

You think for a minute, if this was a mistake. Maybe you could put his parts back together and pretend like this never happened. But you look, and see he continues to bleed. First it was the sheets, but it has since dripped off the bed and onto more things in your life—you, your wardrobe, your hobbies, your everything. His bleeding began as a peaceful spray of blood, but matched your violence as you hacked away at him. Soon, there wasn’t an inch of your room that wasn’t stained by him. His gore tells you everything—you cannot let him live like this.

As if honoring his silent final request, you raise your knife again, and begin manically slashing away at whatever was left of him. You vow you will not leave a trace of him behind.

He does not scream, or even cry, as his life is drained from him. You swear you can see whatever remains of his face smile.

You, however, want to scream, and cry, and can’t, because you and your room and your everything is plastered in as many layers of the boy’s blood as it can hold, and you can’t let people know the pain of what happened in this room today, so you shut up, and you endure his pain as he did.

When you are done, you see you have broken your promise, as he still remains, his body resembling more meat than man. He has joined his blood in covering you and your room, and when you try to wipe him off of you, you find he clings to you for dear life. You scoop up what you can, making more of a mess of yourself in the process, shove him into the closet, and pretend like you have done a good job at hiding what's left of him.

Your room used to be full of color. The walls were cheerful yellow and sheets lovely white, your desk calming brown, your curtains a fun blue, your dresser a simple green. Now it is red. A disgusting, fleshy, wretched red, an ulcer to remind you of a world that used to seem full of life, and now instead reminds you of the one you took instead.

You need to clean yourself of him, rid the evidence of live butchering that has been committed, so you step outside the room, close the door behind you, and pray no one ever opens it again.

The boy-no-longer had a father, who spots you as you leave your room. He addresses you as your victim’s name, and you ignore it, as he ignores how you are drenched in his son, holding the knife that took him away. This is the way of men—ignore the problem, and there is no problem. So you two will pretend his son still lived, so that neither of you have to confront his blood spilling off of you and into the hall.

You wonder if the father of the boy knows he is your father, too. You hope he doesn’t. If he found out, and found the creeping red your life can't get rid of, you might be the next body someone is trying to hide. You wonder that if he killed you here, would you bleed over his life as the boy has yours, or if he could wash his hands clean of you.

You rush to the bathroom, ignoring the father as he does you, and wash your hands. They pretend to be clean and not just as bloodied as they were before. In the mirror, covered in him, you see the face of the boy you had left to die. You grab the knife out of reflex, and take it to your own throat, in an attempt to do him in once and for all.

The knife breaks the skin, and you and the boy’s blood begin to mix. You think about killing yourself, and stop, realizing you already have.

You drop the knife and watch it fall to the ground. Perhaps wearing his face and blood around is your punishment for doing him in, for thinking yourself better than he ever will be.

He was only 16. He had a future ahead of him and you killed him. He had a life as a man ahead of him and you killed him.

You grab bandages hidden in a forgotten cupboard and wrap them around your neck. It would be unfair for you to die now, after you had chosen to end his life just a few minutes earlier. You have chosen to bear these sins—you are not allowed to take the easy way out, like he had.

You sneak back to your room, parts of him falling off of you as you sprint past his father, and are greeted by the smell of him already beginning to rot. The stench burrows into you, and claims you as its own, and before long, you smell of his corpse, too. Bile grows in your throat, but you swallow it, and your pride. You look at the flesh pile resting in the closet and watch it decompose in front of you. You don’t know what to do with your body, let alone his.

Looking at him, or at least what remained of him, reminds you of the smile he wore as he died, and of why you had wanted to kill him in the first place.

The two of you had known each other for a while. Two minds in one, one who lives in the present, and one who wishes they could be so much more. He was the present, and you were the more.

He lived well in the present. He was the boy everyone thought he was. He told jokes and laughed and pretended to not be hurting. He never changed because change meant he wouldn’t be that boy anymore.

Yet, before today, he was also hurting, carrying a disease everyone pretended wasn’t terminal. His body was set to betray him. He and it were at odds, and he was doomed to self-destruct to a body he was not built for.

You, then, were the idea of what you two could be, if the present need not hold us back. You were no man, you were a something neither of you had words for yet. You were there to say there was a future we needn't hurt in. He listened to your words when he couldn’t listen to his own anymore.

So when stanching the wounds of his body became too much to bear, he decided the present wasn’t worth living in anymore. So he came to you for guidance. He said he wanted you to live instead.

You watched as he handed you the knife which would do in the present, and choose to live as your best self. No longer would the two of you live as the one everyone thought was correct, that boy, only 16, future ahead of him, a future where if he didn’t end his present self now, his body would do him in only years later.

You weep, for he won't. You cry for a future that would have never come. You did him in so that you might see a future he cannot be there for. You are coated in his blood and life and everything he had lived for up until this point. He has stained the past in the hopes you might create a future.

You stand in your room covered in a red that will never wash away. No matter how much you try, no amount of cleansing can rid you of it. You debate, for a minute, if you even wanted to. Despite the gore, it reminded you of what he gave his life for. It’s his signal to leave it all behind, no matter how painful it was to get here. To wash that away would be cruel to the victim of the future that he was.

Tomorrow, you will have to go to school wearing him, for he has stained everything you’ve ever owned. No one is going to question that he was hurting, as he had for years now. If you are lucky, someone will notice the blood covering you, and ask who it is, but you will have to stay silent for now. You wonder if you looked good in his red, but already know the answer—of course you don’t.

So months from now, you will need to get new clothing not stained by him, and let yourself be defined by not what you own and what you are, but by what you want to be. You will be the yellows and whites and browns and blues and greens your life used to be filled with.

And in a few years time, when your body is no longer defined by the blood which had long dried up and fallen off, and you live far away from that horror show of your room, you will find that you are no longer seeing his red. You will be the person you two dreamed of, and will face the facts of what happened today—killing him was the best thing that ever happened to the two of you.

Today, however, you are still drowning in his blood, and his sacrifice. You can feel his pain as if it was your own, and there is no going back to that boy who bled behind the backs of all those who loved him. While he had you to go to when scared of the future, you have no one to guide you. You are alone and surely scared.

You are also free.

He was only 16. He had no future ahead of him so you killed him. He had no life as a man ahead of him so you killed him. So that you, carrying the weight of who he was, can live the life of two souls who found peace killing the part of her who hated who she was.