Page 73 of Dirty Monsters

He never showed.

I’d visited the beach each morning hoping to see him on his surfboard, but he never made an appearance there either.

It was like he’d become a ghost. I started to wonder if maybe Ro had been a ghost all along. Had I made him up to salvage some semblance of my childhood to chase away the nightmares of Kane?

No, I couldn’t have. I knew he was real. He had to be, or else I was losing my goddamn mind. My heart wasn’t into anything anymore. I was following my routines, talking to Lisa like I was made to, but I kept to myself. Shawn finally stopped hanging out with me when I brushed him off too many times.

I was losing weight. My hair was falling out.

I was lost.

The days dragged on, dull and boring. I craved to run back to my room and sit on the balcony and watch the surf. Hoping maybe he’d join me in a daydream. I only wanted to see his face again once. To know he was real.

I wished I was numb, then it wouldn’t sting so much. The betrayal, the lack of love.

The world moved on around me while I sat in a state of sadness. Day after day, I’d started to lose hope. I had nothing to live for. This was why I had addictions. This was why I’d been brought to rehab in the first place.

To cure me.

But magically, it’d only made my addiction worse, and the one person who could cure it didn’t even have the fucking decency to tell me he was alive.

His absence was everywhere I looked, and it was killing me inside. I didn’t know how to cope. How to deal. I was back to square one but with no way to get a fix or high.

So, after giving up, I managed to pull the razor from my shaver. I held it in my hands as my brain worked overtime.

I used to listen to people talk about cutting, talk about harming themselves, and I understood now why they did it. It took away the feelings, the loneliness, the pain. It bled you out drop by drop until you lay there lifeless on the cold bathroom floor, hoping to slip into the next life. The last bit of oxygen sucked from the last cell in your body until you suffocated on life itself, on nothing.

I wanted to see if I’d get the same feeling. I wanted the bleeding to make the pain slip away. I wanted the pain to remind me I was alive, and he was real. But I also wanted to be numb.

Numb, so I didn’t feel like a limb of my body had been hacked off.

The blade felt heavy in my hand as if it weighed a thousand pounds, or maybe it was the weight of what doing this to myself would mean.

A tear slipped down my cheek and beaded up on the blade. There, in an instant, I crumpled. I took the blade against my creamy white flesh and let it slice through the top layer of skin. I dragged it along the innermost part of my thigh. I didn’t need anyone to know. This was only for me.

I cried out in pain as the blood seeped from my leg in a trail. It was draining out of me, taking the feelings along with it and leaving a numb shell behind.

I used to live in a house where I was told God would punish the sinners, and somehow, I believed taking a blade to myself was sinning. I was afraid of what my parents would think, what the world would think. I’d been told stories from a young age about eternal damnation and the fiery pits of hell, and somehow, the idea of it scared me more than the monsters who slept inside the same house as me.

Life is a valley of consequences. One wrong move and something bad happens. The earth tilts on its axis, and we all fall to our deaths, wondering if what we have done in life was good enough to save our immortal souls.

Fuck this soul. If life and love hurt this bad, then I didn’t want any damn part of it. So, I did it again. I painted another stripe of blood down my leg, held my breath so I didn’t scream, and felt the pain as it lashed through me.

Nothing could save me now. There would be no heaven and no hell. I was already there. Living without him was absolute hell. Maybe this was my own forced torture. Maybe I was meant to be alone for all the choices I made along the way.

I’d done this to Ro and me. I’d pushed him away for too long. I’d told him to kill Kane.

I often wondered if I’d ever get the happily ever after. The chance to fall in love and be loved, but it was another lie I told myself because fairy tales didn’t happen to monsters like me. Fairy tales were made up of white knights, castles, princesses, and I wouldn’t have any of those.

My heart was lacerated and bleeding out day in and day out. So I kept cutting at night under the cover of darkness. I didn’t want Lisa to find out because it’d be a big deal, and it was the last thing I wanted. I needed to get out of here, away from Florida. Away from the pain.

Every so often, Kane visited me in my dreams. The night at the beach came back to haunt me time and time again. Only, with time, it grew increasingly worse. One night, I dreamed he raped me, but I was too numb to care. I woke up with a start, wanting to scream, but nothing would come from my lungs. I was drowning in oxygen.

The cutting numbed me to Ro’s absence, but it still didn’t fix the overload of need and hatred as it radiated inside me. He’d once said to me maybe he was my new addiction. But I could replace addictions with ease. It’d been weeks since I’d seen Ro, and I had yet to find a new addiction.

He was more than that.

I still pictured him walking back through my door pretending he hated me and loving me in the dark.