A BREAKING  UP

Dreams

Open windows, sharpened scissors, plastic razors.  These are the things I dream about.

Guilt

I feel guilt.  But this is no original sin.  No, it’s rather unique.

Yesterday

Yesterday I broke up with my girlfriend.  Broke her heart the way glass is broken.  Shattered.  Tiny pieces that cut the skin.  I’m only skin deep.

Suicide

I chucked her from an open window, slit her throat with some scissors, and then sliced her wrists with a plastic razor.  There was a lot of blood.  It looked cool against the white concrete, the white sheets, the white bathroom floor.  Red swallowing white like the splash of paint.

Thoughts

I told her that I think about suicide.  If you’re alive then you want to be dead. It’s natural like dying in your sleep.  I close my eyes and I feel my chest heave with each breath.  I feel my legs tire beneath me.  They want to collapse.  I want to disappear.  My dangling arms brush against my hips.  Tickling.  I want to feel nothing.

Conversation

I told her all people want to die.  We all want emptiness.  It’s easier.  She said we all want what we can’t have.

Irony

I can’t have her.  Anymore.  I want her back.

Relationships

She told me this is why she didn’t want to be in another relationship.  Too painful.  No matter how well it’s going there’s always hurt.  It’s unavoidable.  I know exactly what she means.  It’s like life.  This is why I didn’t want to be born.

Sex

Yesterday I told her we had to break up.  We were already broken.  I think about this stuff.  She opened my desk drawer.  She found a condom wrapper ripped in two.  A perfect split down the plastic center.  She had torn it the night before, just before suffocating me with the contents.  Not having to think is bliss.

Art

The perfect suicide is all planning and precision.  Sure you could jab a knife in your stomach.  But you’d probably just bleed a little and end up at the hospital for loonies.  Long-sought darkness would turn into bright lights and masked faces.  Piece of advice: don't fail.  Suicide is no business for regret, only oblivion. It's an art.

History

Now the Samurai.  They got it right.  Take a sword and slash open your midsection.  Then, while you’re holding your own intestines in your lap, have a buddy lop off your head.  Perfect.  Wait—that’s not really suicide is it?

Logic

I’m going to stick to windows, scissors, and razors.  It’s logical.

Love

Love is mutilating your girlfriend the way you yourself want to be mutilated.  She never deserved the hurt.  I do.  But I can’t commit to anything.  I fell in love with a pair of scissors.  We have spent so many intimate hours together. Sharpening, re-sharpening, re-re-sharpening.  I tongue the edge of the blade to feel the precision.  The pair’s tips finger my bare skin.

Consummation

We practice the motion, one swift slash across the throat.  But we never consummate the marriage.

Doubt

I look at the open window and its promises of an airy embrace and a sunlit kiss. And then the razor on my nightstand and the cool touch of metal and plastic. How can I choose the scissors over my other lusts?  How can I say I will be happier spending eternity with my pair of perfect blades?  I love them.  Yes, of course I do.  But—

Fear

What about my girlfriend?  I killed her because I was too afraid to kill myself.  I broke her heart because I refuse to break mine.  I won’t let her get that close. I’m afraid.

Morning After

I step into the shower.  I dip my head under and water slides down my body like tiny snakes.  I rip my heart out.  I hold the pulsing mush in my hand and massage it with my fingers.  Blood spins around the drain, a circling whirlpool.  I squeeze my heart and it pops like a water balloon.  Blood explodes against the walls, the floor, my wet skin.  But I’m still alive.  The heart dissolves into red goo and spins in the whirlpool and goes down the drain.

Cleansing

After a few minutes, water has washed away all of the blood.  I finger the empty hole where my heart used to beat.  Now crushed and broken.  There will be a scar.  Once again I’m surrounded by white shower walls and clean naked skin.  I want to ruin everything.      

Bio: In 2008, Andrew Ross wrote, produced, and directed "The Rebel," a full-length play performed at The Avalon Theater in Easton, MD. Currently, Andrew is finishing a novel for thesis and an M.A. in Fiction Writing at Johns Hopkins University.