The drowning girl

Once there was a girl, a happy girl, full of life and love. She would look on ahead at the future she would experience with joy and excitement. Nothing could touch her.
She went on, loving each day more than the last. Until a darkness touched her. She no longer looked in the mirror to see that smiling young girl looking back at her. Instead she saw death. These days continued, the death growing stronger in her eyes, consuming her will to live. It suffocated her, drowned her in a way that no one could see. She turned away from her friends, thinking all she was was a burden. She missed the way her best friend untangled the curls in her hair and the way they talked when they shared the same interest. She lost interest in everything. Except from words. Words postponed her life. They made her feel something. She could read about someone else’s problems when she could no longer identify her own. The girl in the mirror was dead.
She didn’t eat dinner with her family anymore and lay in bed unable to motivate herself into getting back into routine. She was drowning and nobody was their to act as a lifeguard. It was too dark inside, no light at the end of the tunnel.
She loved to draw. Deep dark lines that consumed the canvas. She would draw until it hurt. Until she wore jumpers in the summer. The picture spread to her legs and forbad her to wear shorts like the other girls. The pretty girls who hadn’t a care in the world. The pretty girls who dated boys and smiled in the mirror and who had fountains of friends. She did not envy these girls though, it was not their fault that they were beautiful and happy. Her family said she was too young to feel this way so she ended up in a chair in a therapist’s. They looked at her like it was her fault, that it was something she could control but they didn’t understand. It was a snowball effect she thought, one thing collecting up after another, rolling out of control. She had no hope left.
She took her problems to the train station. She wanted so badly to escape into another world. A world where there were bright colours bursting right before her eyes. It was a selfish thought but weren’t you allowed to give up if it got too difficult? So difficult that after the first punch you aren’t able to get back up? Fighting is pointless, the voice whispered in her mind. She couldn’t jump. Couldn’t spread her problems to somebody else. But nobody would miss her, and surely her family would be okay? They would get over it, like people always have to do. They wouldn’t be mad with her … She would explain it in her note, a note that explained how badly the pain hurt. The unbearable pain that nobody understood. She bottled it and drowned it out with sleeping pills and razor blades.  They were the only things dulling the pain. She deserved the cuts. Her mind drifted to how people at school would take it. Would they even care? Would that best friend come and say her goodbyes? What about all those people who had hurt her more than she had hurt herself? She would invite them to her funeral, she thought savagely. But it would be a suicide, so nobody would bring flowers. It was her fault. If this was her future she didn’t want it.