Bright Lines

2. Bright Lines

The pain was so excruciating that the primitive, instinctual mind swept in and strangled her hold on the cold, metal object in her hand. The lapse only lasting a few agonizing seconds before the euphoria set in.
She could feel her mind escaping the confines of her body; the binding chains were thrown off, liberating her imprisoned soul. With a sigh of relief she became a light, downy feather abreast the rising air currents. She bobbed rhythmically to the deep internal breathing of the earth. She held her breath, afraid to disturb the feeling of inner peace and warmth suffusing her body. It broke through barriers and walls that were cemented into her soul by time. Shattered her strongholds and allayed age old fears of insecurity and worthlessness. In this second now she was more than worthy.
Colors appeared brighter as if life had been washed back into them. The bleach had leeched out and leaves on the elm trees outside ran green with the sap of life. The sky seemed to bleed blue into the day. She exhaled slowly, carefully and watched her breath become kaleidoscopic reds, greens, yellows and shiny purples. Tentatively she reached out and touched the brittle clouds of vapor and dissipated them into slithering ribbons of light. Their beautiful reflections made her eyes hurt and her heart contract with sadness and loss.
Her body became weightless, tethered to the earth by a gossamer spider’s thread. Threadbare she had come into this earth and threadbare she would escape its confines. Her thoughts scattered and twisted, undulating lazily around the idea of living and surviving. Perhaps and perhaps not she thought, giggling giddily. Control was hers to keep or to release. How easy it would be to allow her life to slip silently away. Allow it to be carried away on sea breezes and on the white feathers of barn owls.
Her outer shell could then become one with the earth, decomposed and nutrient rich. Her bits and pieces gnawed at and scurried away by chipmunks and field mice; becoming part of a shelter here and the lining of a cozy nest there. Scattered and mindlessly free she would roam the earth, and her life’s circle could close, ending where it had begun…..dust to dust. At this thought a lazy self-indulgent smile curled at the corners of her wide mouth.
Cocooned against the brutal onslaught of the world she allowed the cloak of spider’s silk to wrap itself tightly around her floating, bobbing body. She viewed herself as she would like to be…the essential part of the whole. A small, moving, essential cog in the vastness of the wheel she called life. At last she would be needed.
The sudden, shocking awareness of a slight movement in the silvery threads; flooded her body with icy premonitory pinpricks. Reality was the fly treading the crisscrossing veins, eluding capture. She was being forced back into a world she hated. She fought the mind numbing force, but the battle was already lost…the sword thrown down…the euphoria torn from her grasp. Her spidery cloak shredded beyond repair.
Enraged she silently screamed against the loss of belonging, of being one with the universe. Her soul abruptly bounced back into her body, entrapped like the fly lured into the spider’s silken embrace and eaten voraciously.
She looked down at the whiteness of her dimpled thighs against the black tiles. Three bright lines crept along her flesh, dripping scarlet red to meet the lifeless bathroom floor. She dropped the razor into its hiding place, smiled and carelessly wiped the blood away with the back of her hand.
In her mind the razor equaled freedom, for a short while, from the pain of living. The secret thought pleased her.
“Until next time….” she whispered breathlessly.