And then he stopped. Shane leaned his forehead against mine, breathing heavily, our eyes still closed, and he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
"Astra," he mumbled against my lips. "Please don't hurt yourself."
And all at once, his body fell l...
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C H A P T E R F O R T Y - N I N E
tw // self harm + suicide ideologies
A s t r a *.✧
The stinging ebbed its way throughout my arm, spreading up from my forearm to my upperarm to my shoulder until there was a dull heavy ache pining in almost every aspect of me. I felt numb. Numb was good – it meant I couldn't feel the emotional pain or mental anguish of anything.
I wondered if anybody else had ever felt like this. The need to be numb and drawn from the rest of the world. It was like I'd known something bad was going to happen; yesterday was good, too good, and especially when I'd become suddenly ill last night reality just hit me. It all seemed distant and fazed, like a dream.
I felt sick to my core still, but the bath was helping to relieve my headache. I didn't go to school today so Kyrie had taken Finley to his match and Mariam, his mom, had taken him to school. Also with the prospect of going back to school, I had to face Mr Miles' unecessary detention. That sorry sack of potatoes wasn't going to let me get away with it this time.
It wasn't necessarily the fact that I wanted to hurt myself. I just liked the feeling – I craved the feeling of satisfaction after. It made me feel good enough, in a weird way. It made me feel the pain my soul felt and provided temporary relief. And it was like an addiction; once you start, you can't stop.
You should have never started in the first place.
I opened my eyes to see a diluted pink filling the bathtub. A flow of dark red spreading out in the waters, leading from my arm. I sighed, breathing in and dunked my head under the water for a few minutes, allowing the silence of the water-filled underworld to blur everything away and distort reality.
Stop trying to be Hannah Baker.
I heard my phone ping from a distant, and a sudden roaring gradually began to build in my ears. Silence. My lungs were starting to burn but I wanted to see how far I could go. I wanted to feel what it was like to be so close to the edges of death.
My breath was slipping away and everything around the edges of my vision had turned completely black. Stars burst and dots danced around. Close… so….
The door banged open downstairs and I sat up gasping, water running off me. I coughed harshly, coughing and gasping for air. A few gushes of water poured out of my throat. Water ran down from my face in huge drips and streams and I turned to see my reflection faintly in the shower wall. My eyes were dark, mascara having leaked and ran down my face, rubbed around my eyes.
For some reason unknown to me, I liked to wear mascara right before I had a shower so that it would smudge everywhere. It made me look sort of emo and gothic but sometimes that was the vibe I was going for. Seeing as I was bored at home today and absent from school, I decided to… experiment. And during this makeup experiment, I was at home hating myself and thinking about a particular boy who seemed to be living in my head. Trying to yank him out of there was useless so I just accepted fate.
