Bountiful

I finally wanted to live, but I died, for 4 minute 26 seconds, I was dead. I suppose you could say I’m just one of those people who it takes something as drastic as dying to wake them up to the world around them. But there I was, on a freezing cold October night, faced down on a cold wet street with heavy drops of rain creating a puddle around me, tinged with red from my blood soaked hair, I was awakened. I awakened to the vivid colors surrounding me, to the soundless night just beyond my grasp on the other side of the ringing in my ears, to the salty taste and metallic smell that consumed my senses for a moment making me heave desperately. I awakened to the reality that the man that I had loved and who had brutally loved me had left me here to die after yet another rage brought on by…oh what was it this time? I can’t remember, my head throbbing relentlessly. Lying there in this broken, discarded and soon to be forgotten body, I finally felt the life that had deserted me over two years ago come flow into me as I felt the all too familiar feelings of fading into unconsciousness. I often wondered how I would die. I don’t think I’m the only twenty-one year old woman in the world who has ever contemplated her own death. In fact there are those that ask the question and face the prospect of it every day. I only faced it sometimes. I welcomed the feeling of losing consciousness. The nothingness would drown out the hatred and disgust in his voice as he yielded my failures and shortcomings at me like daggers, the darkness creep through my body replacing the pain with numbness and then I would surrender to it completely and be taken for this place because I knew the pain that caused the bruises and broken bones was over and the healing would begin. He would even be sorry and beg my forgiveness. As long as I could hold out and take the blows and give him the satisfying cries of agony and tears he so desperately loved, I knew I could find my peace in the darkness. This time, however, I embraced the darkness again, but confident for the first time in so long that my will to live was great and with me and I would wake up, get up, and live.