Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Twenty Four - Stop Bleeding

School breaks let loose immense extents of free time, and being the pathetically social life lacking teenager that I embarrassingly was, I mainly spent those extra hours asleep. Continuing this, I had passed shameful expanses of winter holiday in my bed. While this wasn’t  particularly lousy on its own, I had done close to nothing else, forcing me to repeatedly panic over the fact that I was wasting my existence and glaring at life ticking by impossibly fast yet simultaneously painfully slowly as I waited  to cease being me. 

Unfortunately, I had hopelessly given up on seizing the biting hours by the rapid end of my break, instead resigning to laying blearily in bed until twelve and spending the of my time off hanging up laundry while idiotically dancing around my room, blasting Blink’s live CD and desperately trying to pretend that I was there, breathing in the jumping crowd and living instead of scarcely surviving on distractions. 

Even this lame plan was obnoxiously ruined, though, by a cracking knock on my door at nearly eleven. I was already groggily awake, though I was still clinging groggily to the last peels of sleep, Joseph curled loosely in my arms and my scrambled thoughts still partially believing that I was dreaming. My mind was impressively slow at jolting back into reality after being stuck in the whimsical fantasy world that it had created as I snored into emptiness. I’d been dreaming of winning some sort of odd singing game show – this was impossible and exceedingly ridiculous for multiple reasons, the least of which being my perpetual reluctance to sign along to even my favorite music because I it simply did the songs an injustice. Nothing that my brain constructed late at night was ever logical, though, increasingly rarely even possible.

My watery eyes were pried to open, annoyingly, mind weakly realizing that I was a resident of Earth and not Lala Land as I stared cautiously at my waving walls, rolling sluggishly out of bed and turning my irritated gaze on the door a moment later. With a stinging, sleepy look, rumpled hair, and what must have been a slightly peeved expression, I tugged my creaking door open, frowning when I spotted May on the other side with my half-lidded glare.

She just shot me a fake smile, declaring, “Mom told me to wake you up because we have to be at Grandma’s in two hours and you take forever to get ready.”

I slowly grumbled something unintelligible in acknowledgement, shutting and locking the door as my sister happily padded off down the hall. Dejectedly staring at the dinged wood facing me after she left, I pulled mindlessly on the fraying hem of my sweatpants, muddled mind belatedly hoping that they hadn’t previously been low enough to expose any of the thin red lines patterning my hips.

I stumbled back across my messy room, thumping down onto the edge of my bed and watching my fingers twiddle together, thumbs still vertically dashed across with jagged, ripped scratches. I was replacing those defects faster than they healed.

Biting my peeling lip as my brain spun fully into frenzied action, my thoughts whirled into a bizarre hurricane of screams, wails, and complaints. And suddenly, I was mad.

Fucking pissed, because I already planned on doing nothing that Sunday, having completely forgotten about the stupid ass family get together I was supposed to visit, and, really, was it so impossible to desire having one single day where I didn’t have to be subjected to some crap that I despised? Obviously, yes. It was absurd, really, but as I gloomily contemplated my abused fingers, I couldn’t help but speculate about what I'd done to deserve all the shit that I suffered through, even though enduring a relative gathering wasn’t actually such an unbearable pain.

I glanced at the flashing red numbers that continuously assaulted me every morning, quietly clocking the fact that I had an excessive amount of time to get ready. It would barely take an hour to shower, style my hair, and struggle into my clothes. I’d continued the detrimental practice of skipping breakfast over the holiday, and, therefore, had right over an hour to spare.