Questions (That Must Be Answered)

         When do people think of lost opportunities the most? When do they worry about all the chances they should have taken, of all the chances they might have had? Jason smiled to himself as he painted these questions on his bathroom mirror, using his index finger as the brush, and the blood coming from his wrist as his paint. He felt himself getting cold, and laughed again. He dabbed his brush onto the paint some more, and forced himself to focus. “I need to finish this,” he muttered to the gangly, pale-faced boy in the mirror. “They need to know why I did it.” As he raised his personal brush, he looked at the hamburger wrapper on the sink next to him and he thought back to why, and to how he could word this last, eternal message.
         Jason Long looked across the lunchroom at Kristen Keen, and felt his hands start to clam up. “I can do this. I can do this. I CAN,” he chanted as he stood up from his isolated table. He passed a dark window, and caught a glimpse of his reflection. He turned to study this weak attempt of a creation and shrugged off all the negative feelings he had grown up accepting as true. “You look good. You are good. You are nice, and you make people smile. Your teacher even likes your new haircut. You look good,” he chanted, mixing some of his own thoughts with his psychiatrist’s. He ran a slender hand through a long, oily mess of dark brown… style.
         He liked thinking of his hair as stylish, for that was the only thing his father had given him before he moved away. Well, that and a face full of bruises and a head full of memories of his mother crying. Jason understood what that had done to his mother, which was why he accepted the mental and physical abuse she rained down on him, day after day. He knew she loved him, and was only letting him know what was wrong with him. He was okay with that. He wasn’t okay with her boyfriends, and what they did to him when she was in the other room though…
         Jason snapped himself out of his memories as he looked away from the mirrored window and back to the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Kristen got up from her table of friends, another triviality that Jason didn’t have, and started to take her half eaten hamburger to the trash. “Now is your chance to woo her! Go get the girl of your dreams Jason. Just try to be positive, and smile!”
         Jason walked up to Kristen, and couldn’t muster up the strength to say anything to her. He just stared into her eyes, those brown orbs that seemed to glow in an exotic and unnatural way. She felt his eyes, and turned to consider the school reject. She could read his mind from the way he looked at her, and she was utterly disgusted. She smiled at him, though, for she was the ‘nice’ girl. Then she handed him her hamburger and hissed quietly through a smile, “Back off, freak. I don’t need you to contaminate me with your problems.” Then she walked away.
         The towel was still swinging when Kelly Long walked into her son’s bathroom. She was pissed off when she saw a half a hamburger on the brand new couch in the living room, and she opened her mouth to let him have another scorching remark about his looks, his personality, or maybe just about him being alive. Her mouth stayed open as she saw the blood in a puddle around the corpse on the tiles. She noticed something to the left… and she saw a message on his mirror. When do people think of lost opportunities the most? When do they worry about all the chances they should have taken, of all the chances they might have had? Why do people wallow in self-pity? Why are people miserable? Why are people born just to be a burden to those they love? Yet most of all, Why Am I Not Loved?