Redemption

The door is locked and she sits with her back against it. Her heart is throbbing with such intensity that it actually hurts to breathe. She sobs silently to herself as she replays the last half hour of her life. Her hands begin to shake as that half hour turns into a day, a month, a year before this exact moment. She covers her mouth to stifle the cries that have managed to maneuver and escape around the lump in her throat. She rocks herself back and forth, with her arms clutched around her legs and her head buried between her knees. Devastation like this is based more on perception and interpretation than on the actuality of the situation at hand. The rationalization works only in her head though, not on the heart that’s slowly breaking out of her ribcage.
She sees it from where she’s sitting, teasing her, seducing her. She slithers across the room to grab it and then back to her position, blocking the locked door. She looks down and runs her fingers over the smooth edges of the metal tin that she had been eyeing.
She smirks to herself as she travels back to the day she found this candy tin. It was perfect, pink, smooth, shiny, cool to the touch and the perfect size to hide her demons. The word ironic comes to mind every time she sees it.
She opens her eyes and she’s back in the room, propped against the door, sobbing to herself as she gingerly opens her pink candy tin. Everything that she needs is right here in the palm of her hand. Giving in would be so easy. She forces herself to calm down and closes her puffy red eyes as she focuses on controlling her breathing. She tells herself that she won’t do this tonight, not again. She slowly starts to lose the will to convince herself as she hypnotically watches the way the light plays off of the contents of her tin. Everything is here and it would be so easy just to take everything out and set up her ritual, her escape, the personification of her anguish. Nobody will know, she tells herself. She pulls out the contents of the pretty pink tin and turns each piece over in her hand. She can feel the adrenaline pumping into her veins and her heartbeat speed up. She closes her eyes, smiles and then begins to cry again as she gives into the very thing that she swore she’d never do again.