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Phillip, look at me, I'm a stamp!
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Portsmouth, UK
I am currently:  
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I gave myself a break from revision after the TWO exams I had today, one of them two hours, 15 minutes..and the other three hours =( It killed me.
But I couldn't face revising for more exams on Monday, so I wrote another chapter :]
Here's a warning though, this chapter could be very triggering, so make sure you read it ONLY if you're completely safe.
Chapter Four
“You’re going to have to talk to me sometime, you know.” My mother stood in my doorway, watching me pack my suitcase and waiting for me to say something. I didn’t, so she carried on, “You need help. It was either that or wait for you to kill yourself.” I continued to ignore her in the hope she would leave me alone; leave me to pack for my ‘new home’ as she had called it.
I carried on packing, refusing to look at her and kept my back towards the door until she left. Once she was gone, I searched under my bed for the shoebox I had decorated with glitter, ribbons and coloured in with crayons when I was seven. I kept everything that had made me happy at the time in there. I sat on the floor and opened it, placing the lid beside me and taking each individual item out separately, studying them, feeling the happiness I felt when I first put it in the box. Photos from when I was young and would climb trees with my cousins; rocks I drew faces on and named as my special ‘pets’; the ring my grandmother had given to me as a little girl because I loved it so much when she first showed it to me. Slowly but surely, my memories gathered around me until I came to what I was looking for. Silver. Shiny. Sharp. I held the single-edged blade in my hand and studied it more carefully than the other possessions I kept, as if terrified I could damage it as much as it had frequently damaged me.
“This is our little secret, Keira,” he whispered in my ear. “No one would believe you if you told anyone.”
My eyes snapped open and my hand automatically went to the bottom of my sleeve, pulling it up to the elbow and pressing the sharp edge of the blade onto my skin. I hesitated. Listened for any movement of my mother downstairs. My brother was out with friends, my dad at work. I heard the kitchen door close as my mum went into the kitchen to make lunch for herself – she had given up making it for me. I pushed the blade harder against my arm until I felt it bite, took a deep breath and dragged it across. Crimson beads quickly rolled off the sides of my arms and into the cream carpet. But I didn’t care. And I didn’t stop. I cut again. And again, crisscrossing over old scars, over new cuts. At that moment, I didn’t think I would ever stop. I didn’t want to live anymore. Deeper. It’s all you deserve.
“Keira!” my mother shrieked. I hadn’t heard her come upstairs. Still, I carried on. “What the hell are you doing?” She ran across my bedroom towards me and pulled my hand holding the blade away from my arm, which was still dripping all over my carpet. I still didn’t care. My mother didn’t seem to either. “Oh, my god! Why do you keep doing this to yourself? What have I done to make you hate me so much? To keep hurting me like this?”
I laughed at the irony of the question, but refused to answer, looking at the mess of my carpet. Suddenly, that was the most important thing in the world. “Oh. I’ve ruined the carpet.” I put my hand on it before I realised I’d used the hand which was covered in blood. I tried to complain again, to take the attention off of my arm, but my mother bent down, wrapped her arms around my waist and dragged me to the bathroom, shoved my arm in the sink and turned the taps on. “Clean yourself up,” she sighed as she pulled her mobile phone out of her pocket whilst still holding my arm under the flowing water. I watched the crystal clear water change colour as it hit the blood and carried it away down the drain. It was mesmerising.
“Come on,” my mum said and took my arm from under the water. I must have been watching the water hit my arm for longer than I had thought; my mother was now off of the phone. Who she phoned, I did not know, but the next thing I knew, she was bundling me into the car with a towel wrapped around my arm to control the blood flow. I started daydreaming again and it felt like I was at the hospital within seconds. She took me into the hospital, told the receptionist her name, my name and why we were here, to which the receptionist pointed towards a door to the left of the desk and responded, “If you’d like to sit in the waiting room, someone will see you shortly.”
As soon as she’d said the word ‘shortly’, I knew we were in for a very long wait. I was not proved wrong. We were left in the waiting room for about an hour, me clutching the towel to my arm which was getting more and more soaked with my blood by the minute, my mother sat next to me, staring into space; probably trying to come to terms with how much I’d ‘hurt her’, as she’d put it. Eventually, a nurse came into the waiting room and called our last name. We followed her into another room down the hospital corridor and I was ordered by the nurse to sit upon the bed at the side. I did as I was told and she removed the towel from my arm, sharply sucking in her breath as she saw the state of my arm. At that moment, I heard the door slam and I knew my mother had once again bailed on me.
Without looking up from attempting to clean up the dry blood that now caked my arm as well as fresh blood still leaking from my cuts, the nurse simply said, “She’ll be okay. People deal with this sort of information in different ways, especially parents. Give her time to process it.” She continued cleaning me up and then said, “We’re going to need this stitched up, the blood flow’s not slowing down as much as it should have done.” She pulled over a tray, with all of the equipment needed to stitch up my wounds, as if they had known I was coming. I didn’t question it; I was starting to feel a bit faint.
“It’s the blood loss,” the nurse told me, noticing I had gone a bit pale and was shaking a little. I nodded, knowing this already. I paid very little attention to her stitching me up and taking me back outside to my mother sat in the waiting room, again staring into space. I said goodbye to the nurse and walked over to stand in my mother’s eye line, although she didn’t look up. Eyes still transfixed to a blank spot in the waiting room, she stood up and calmly said, “Let’s go home, you’ve got packing to do.”
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