MIRABEL

There are days where I want to kill myself. Because it gets too loud, to the point I can't hear the little voice that keeps me company.

Days that feel too hot, that I want to crawl out of my skin and burn the remains.

Days the cold pierce my chest like arrows, that makes me wish to be enveloped in two sumo wrestlers until I burst.

Why are my days like this? Why do they suffocate me? To the point where the end is more beautiful? More enticing to pursue?

Why is it hard for me to choose to live? To choose to go naked instead of flaying? Why do I find solace in not being?

It has become part of me, to cling to the dark for comfort, to turn off the lights in my room to shield myself and hear my thoughts. To bring some sort of end is for me to live, I can not do without it.

“That is why your begging surprises me, what is there to live for?” I turned away from the windows of the rundown building and watched the professor who laid in my worn out bed.

Writhing, like heaps of maggots.

The room was messy, dried blood was on different parts of the ground, rusted tables and chairs laid around, the curtains were covered with so much dust, it could cause asthma. I had tied him to the bed, a little piece of comfort to take into the afterlife, we all know the pains of a bad back.

“Please let me go!!” He screamed again, he had been doing a lot of screaming, the type that reminded newborn mothers not to be so happy about birth. It was beginning to replay in my head.

“Professor, I'm here to help” I walked closer to his side, covering my nose at the stench of urine. My hair was packed in a bun, my boots were heavy to walk with but I liked the sensation.

“Please! I'll give you anything! Don't do this Mira!” Professor Dylan begged. He even looked more beautiful this way, his beards covered in saliva, his short hair in disarray, beads of sweat hanging around his neck. I wondered if the girls who had a crush on him would mind seeing him like this.

Mirabel, the name my sorry-excuse-of-a mother had managed to do right.

“But you have nothing, Professor,” I smiled. “Your wife took everything when she left, you're barely clinging on to this job, you drink yourself drunk every night at the professor's campus bar, you make mistakes in your teaching, slur your words during lectures, jump at the nearest approach. Make mistakes when giving scores, you're tired Professor”

The professor was quiet, for the first time. He had tried poorly to hide what the divorce at done to him but people gossip, especially professors who were fucking your roommate and I have a tattle mouth for a roommate. After that, it was easy to see what he was going through, I was here to help him find the answer.

“How.. did … you–”

“There's no reason for you to fight what you already want, Professor. You want it all to end, don't you?”

I felt like my mother, sitting behind her big desk and making me discuss what she thought I was feeling, making short notes on book and her glasses sitting on her nose like she was some sort of professional, a professional who had slept with her mentally deranged patient from prison, like I wasn't the product of that sin. But I was better than her, I didn't need to read big books to read people, I saw it in their eyes. The way it mirrored mine, lifeless. It was beautiful. I wanted to keep it for myself.

Tears rolled down the professor's eyes, he nodded “Yes, I am tired”

“Then why do you bother to live? Let me help with that” I picked up the knife on the small stool beside me, it was my first birthday present from my father. He had shipped it from jail, my mother had hidden it, scared I would become like him but I was not, I was helping people.

The way I had helped her too, when she got tired, when her eyes lost its spark and became more beautiful, the way I had stabbed every flesh in her chest until it couldn't cough out anymore blood. I was nineteen then, it was the closest thing to crawling out of my skin, it was satisfactory. I remembered how much time I had taken into carving out her eyes, into storing them, into reliving that very moment.

She screamed too, so beautifully that I was glad to have recorded it. I fall asleep to her sounds. The rest after her, were bad screamers, they made me want to cut off their vocal cords. The professor would be one too, I should start with his throat.