JoeWokiri

My love for words is great. And, untellable is my appreciation for their stylish application.

I would like to see this challenge have 2 vantages points. You may write with #1 OR #2 as your perspective. True stories only. 1. Something that changed your life in a significant way WITHOUT any reference to how you changed. OR 2. How you changed after a significant moment or event WITHOUT any reference to the change agent.

CatSchooley in A Writer's Path

60 reads

January 26

I stared at the phone in my shaking hand, unable to process what I had just read.

Dead.

The tears began to well in my eyes as the weight of truth crushed me beneath it. I heard my phone crash to the floor before I realized it was no longer in my hand. My dress ripped as I crumbled to the floor.

Dead.

My eyes blurred and I felt the make-up I had spent hours on run down my face. I laid my head against the cold tile of the bathroom floor, letting my tears puddle against my cheek. The pins in my hair dug into my skull, but I felt nothing. My body trembled, my breath shallow as I stared at the fibers of the bath mat. An aqua color with stringy, elastic fiber sticking out of tightly wound carpet fingers. My breath quickened suddenly, my lungs filling with more air than they were prepared to, ripping, fighting against my rib cage. I felt the emotion rupturing through my skin, another deep breath and I screamed as I had never screamed before. I kicked the wall as I tried to sit up. Only to scream and collapse again, hitting my head against the hard floor. Disoriented I felt my pulse in my temple. Thump. Thump. Thump. My lungs burned. My throat burned. My heart beat as fast as it could, desperate to keep me alive as I tried to will myself to die.

Dead.

James was dead. The man who loved me. The man I loved. The man I made the mistake of leaving only a year before. The first man to be good to me. I was too broken then to be loved by someone as true and good and humble as him. His only job, as far as he was concerned, was to provide and care for me, to love me and support me and help me through every endeavour the best he could. I was the toxic one, plaqued by my lack of self awareness and unhealthy relationship expectations. I had left by slyly going to his house while he was work, grabbing the remnants of myself, every piece of evidence that proved I had once been there, and driving out of town. We had began to talk again, as friends, a couple months before. Before... Before... He was murdered.

Good, true, honest James had been murdered by a man he had tried to help. A man he had given a house and food to. Mark, was his name. A homeless man that James met at a party on the lake last summer. James took Mark and his six year old son in, gave them somewhere safe and warm to be until Mark got on his feet. There had been an altercation at the end of that summer between the two of them. Mark had been angry at James for questioning Mark’s parenting methods. Mark had pulled a knife and James had choked him out in self defense. Mark and his son left that day and life went on back to normal. It was barely discussed anymore. Two days ago, Mark had contacted James, saying he wanted to squash the beef and put it behind them. They went to lunch, James paid and Mark was invited to a get-together at Jame’s place that evening. Everything was fine, good even. Nobody at the party suspected any malice, so much so that after James had gone to sleep and the party died out all of James’s friends deemed it safe for them to go home, even with Mark still there.

After the last of the friends had gone home Mark walked into James’s room and watched him as he slept. I do not know how long he stood there, how long it took him to decide that he would murder him, the man I loved, a brother, a son, a friend. I wonder what went through Mark’s mind. Did he think of the consequences? Did unwarranted anger course through his veins, did envy suffocate his compassion, his conscience? After a time he had decided, walked back outside through the kitchen, to his truck and to wherever he stored his hunting equipment. There he found a sharp blade of 12 inches used to gut large game such as deer and elk. Mark then walked back through the kitchen into James’s room and stabbed him. Stabbed him 25 times in the back while James slept.

It is not known if Mark left then or watched as James stumbled out the door before crashing through the bathroom door to the right of his bedroom. James was found face down in a puddle of his own blood on the floor of his bathroom, alone, bleeding out, not standing a chance against the coward of man who decided to take his life. Mark went home. Mark hid the murder weapon, changed out of his bloody clothes, took a shower and went to sleep. Mark returned to work the following Monday, seemingly unfazed by the act he had committed, the crime he had committed, the murder he had committed.

Of course I knew none of this, motionless on the bathroom flooring, trying to force the life from myself, drunk with alcohol, drunk with pain, drunk with rage. I would find all this out in the coming weekes. All I knew then was that a man I owed so much to no longer walked this Earth. A man that I had wronged. A man I gave up for my own selfish, scared, immature reasons.

I don't remember how long I lay on the floor, my head throbbing, nausea dancing at the back of my throat, tears running dry, dress ripping more with every sharp inhale. After an eternity, I placed my hands against the ground, attempting to push myself up. My weight pressed into a wet spot on the tile and I fell back to the ground. I tried again and again, finally using the edge of the bathtub to get one leg under me, the sink to help me get the other. I stood in front of the mirror, make-up no longer smeared but gone altogether. I turned the water on to wash my face and brush my teeth. The exfoliating beads felt like sandpaper against my skin. I rinsed my face, the water warm and soothing against my red hot skin. I stared into the eyes of the woman in front of me, no longer recognizing who I was, no longer knowing what life meant now. I stumbled to my room and laid down, letting the world spin before I closed my eyes. Everything was different now, I didn’t know how, just that it was. I screamed and the world went dark.