by Erin Ajello
And so, I ran-
I ran up the stairs, into my room, and slammed the door behind me.
I could hear my parents voices raise in alarm, could hear them start to follow me up the stairs, and could hear them approaching my shut door.
I slid down the back of the door until I was sitting on the floor of my room, my head racing.
How was I supposed to accept what they’d just told me?
Maybe this was not how they’d thought I would react, but what had they expected?
I certainly hadn’t expected to hear any of this.
I was of course concerned when I’d gotten home from school and seen my father’s car in the driveway.
He was rarely home before dinner, and no one had mentioned that he would be home early tonight.
So I’d been suspicious that something was off from the minute I had walked inside and thrown my backpack by the stairs.
I had walked into the kitchen to see my mother and father talking and was surprised to see that my sister wasn’t inside.
They told me she was at the park with her co-worker and wouldn’t be back for a while, and asked me to sit with them.
I think when any teen is placed in a situation like this they immediately assume that they’ve finally gotten in trouble for all the things they have gotten away with in the past.
I had that guilty feeling, the one where your stomach is lead and you can’t swallow right and all you can do is hope that whatever has been found out isn’t too serious.
But then the conversation hadn’t been about me at all.
I wish it had, though.
I would take anything else over what they actually said, that-
That it was happening again.
Another major surgery for my older sister who acted so much younger and couldn’t help doing so.
I waited until they explained both the medical details of the operation and how it would affect my sister before I’d ran.
I let myself sit for a few minutes in the hopes that my thoughts would eventually grow coherent, but they only grew more emotional.
I let my parents knock on the door and beg me to open it before I pushed my bed in front of it.
Then I started.
I pulled down every poster on my walls, the ones I’d so carefully placed there throughout the years.
I walked over to my bulletin board, stared at it for a second, and slammed it onto the edge of my bed, snapping the rectangular board in half as I did so.
I grabbed books from where they lay upon their shelves at random and began pulling pages out.
All this I did without crying a single tear.
Within minutes, my entire room was destroyed, with one exception.
I calmly stood in front of the window for but a moment.
Then I took a deep breath, pulled both arms back, and punched through the glass.
I couldn’t help but let a scream out of my mouth as the glass slashed my wrists.
Couldn’t help but sway as I saw the blood fall from my arms to the floor.
And I couldn’t help but regret the entire affair when I woke up in the hospital hours later.
