January

And then, all was silent in the world, and a heavy sorrow began weaving its icy fingers along the chambers of his heart. There had been signs. Many of them. But he had refused to lend them the credibility they now so clearly had deserved. He had dismissed them. Ruled them to be nothing more then the over dramatic fancies of an attention starved soul. He had set his will against them, and would not allow them the dignity of existing.

He thought about the EMT’s, wondered whether the children had seen the lights, heard the commotion. He’d never been in the back of an ambulance before. Nor had he ever had to watch one drive away with a loved one. He had felt naked, humiliated when he could not speak to the Paramedic without crying. Who was this man, this stranger, to be allowed to see such a thing? He had reflected on how close they were in age, and found he resented him for that. “No such troubles in his home, I imagine.”

But all of that was gone now. All that was left was the silence, and the sorrow, and the guilt.

He found himself staring at the million sparkling fragments of shattered glass that now blanketed the floor. He was scarcely aware that the bottle had leaped so violently from his hands, and even less aware that it was his fury that had caused it to do so. Life appeared to be skipping, showing him only fragments and blurred glimpses of reality with no regard for the time-line they occurred in.

The chaos was wreaking havoc in his already tumultuous mind, and the crushing silence was amplifying his every thought. But there could be no sound. Not now. For all of it’s efforts, the world had yet to create a piece of music, a single verse, sufficiently sorrow laden enough to accurately accompany the heartbreak he was experiencing. He would have to suffer the silence. “They don’t write songs like this.”

He stood there, motionless, eyes fixed on nothing at all. The world around him dimmed, until all that was left was the darkness. Every fiber of his soul focused inward on a single thought. His darkest thought. His only thought. It echoed and reverberated off the canyons of his mind, over and over.

He was left facing a truth about himself that he had never known existed. For one moment, one single horrible moment, as she lay there before him, motionless, dying, the thought had entered his mind. “Walk away. Just walk away.” He spent the remainder of the night lingering there, in the darkness, drowning in his shame.

He had never hated himself before.

Suicide.

Who knew people did such things?