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When I left the house, fully dressed and with a first edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and our book under my arm, I promised myself that I would repay Alarik for everything he had done for me so far. Even though I didn't yet know what that meant.

Chapter 63

Mady

Blissful Death

by Keiichi Okabe

At some point at fourteen, I had started spending far too long in the shower. It was as if the warmth of the water was exactly what would soothe the pain of all the invisible wounds that refused to heal, and yet it was never enough. A temporary comfort, like everything that seemed beautiful at first glance in this life.

The cold around me was already lurking, waiting to attack me again as soon as I turned off the water, which was why, as so often, I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I sank to my knees, tilted my head back, and allowed the water to whip against my closed eyelids, enjoying the heated wetness, silently begging it to wash away all the dirt from my body that still clung to me after all these years.

Tears mingled with the water flowing down my naked body, and I didn't know how long I had been sitting there when a ring at the doorbell snapped me out of my stupor.

By the time I would get downstairs, the person would be gone. Nevertheless, I forced myself to leave the shower.

My body trembling, I dried myself off, avoiding looking in the mirror as I slipped into my gray panties, but I lost the battle with myself when my gaze fell on the lotion on the bathroom cabinet.

Dazed, I reached for it and stepped cautiously in front of the rickety white wooden mirror, which still bore the flower stickers I had stuck there when I had been eight.

For two weeks now, I had made it my mission to stand in front of the mirror every day, trying to look at my body, to look at each of the hundreds of short, uneven, horizontal white stripes that ran across both of my thighs, along my hips, and along the entire insides and outsides of my arms.

The promise I had made to Ezra and Nash was no longer valid. They were both no longer part of my life, could no longer stop me from ending up on the bathroom floor every night, leaving sticky bloodstains behind.

By now, my arms and legs were so covered that I had started to expand my own battlefield to my hips, my stomach, and the area under my breasts.

I had thought that at some point I would reach a limit. But there was none.

My body was covered in shimmering spider webs. Some stripes crossed each other, but most lay alone, tracing their solitary paths across my skin.

I was worn out. A canvas of my past. A product of my own destruction. And I had lost myself in its cathartic aesthetic.

I couldn't recall when the addiction had taken over. It had started sometime four years ago. Then, for a while, I had suppressed the need for controlled pain, but after Ezra's death, it had just burst out of me. And since then, it hadn't stopped, becoming more and more relentless. Eventually, I would run out of free space.

If someone hurt you physically, it left marks on your skin. But when you were emotionally hurt, your soul tried to find its own ways to make those invisible scars visible on your physical skin.

It was a form of self-betrayal. Not even your own soul tried to treat your body, its home, with care. It allowed pain in order to survive, crumbling piece by piece in the process.

It destroyed itself in order to preserve itself.

A grueling paradox.

I put far too much cold lotion on the palm of my right hand, carefully applying it to the new cuts under my breast and on either side of it, remembering the different kinds of pain one could experience on different parts of the body and how much blood one could lose if not careful.

Why was I still being careful? Why was I still pressing towels onto the deeper cuts as if it would make a difference? Why was I still washing the razor blades?

There had been a time when I had tried desperately to avoid every tear. But now I longed for tears, for the feeling of being able to cry, to let everything out, to scream when necessary, even if it would never bring me relief.

The tear escaped from my right emerald eye, and I turned away from the mirror.

I scrubbed the blood from the sink and the smeared traces of this week from the floor, threw away last night's razor blade, and enjoyed the slight burning of the wound, which seemed to realize that I had betrayed it and that perfumed lotion was not suitable for healing wounds.

Another controlled pain that made me feel something.

Finally, I slipped into Ezra's last clean pair of sweatpants and the only sweater of his that I washed regularly, when my head allowed me to. Then I took the stairs down and opened the front door.