Coping Methods

                                       Coping Methods



         From the last time I would ever see you again, that I would ever hold you in my arms again, I knew instantly that it would take all of my personal strength to get rid of this gnawing, emptying, feeling of pain. As you bled out I gazed over you in the after math of passion, love and hate. I watched you on the floor in front of me, with your mouth overflowing with your own blood. After moments of struggling for air you stopped breathing and just after you did, after what I had done was final, it felt as if my own heart stopped beating. The feeling was so powerful. It was like if I didn’t mentally tell it to keep going that its beat would surely hold at a gripping stop, and I would drop dead right there at your deader than dead body with you. With a tragic death of true love birds running out of time, we would be like Romeo and Juliet, but, no, not in this case. This case was far too different. I couldn’t be sure that I was in love any longer after doing this that I had done.

         While you died, with the gash in your chest deep as the kitchen knife in my tensed up hand, I knew unlike you I was going to go on, and surely as the blood flowing through my veins, my heart continued to pump. Surely as I screamed enraged with regret ringing in my ears, my heart went on. It continued to beat past yours while your wide open eyes still stared back at me. Your weight was dead in my arms as I held you and looked at you for the last time I ever would. I rolled my fingers over the knife, my weapon, the first thing that I had grabbed to stop you as you said such cold, horrible things to me and walked away, clutching my reality. I ended you and all of your shit. I killed our argument, and all of our disagreements with you. I destroyed the ugly of you, because that was all that you really were.

         I was so certainly done with you a split second before this, but now, the selfishness was sinking in. You weren’t always so ugly, so bloody at the mouth and pale. I caressed your face, your skin dropping in temperature. You were not mine to be with anymore, and at the same time, you were also gone for good. You were no longer my animate object to speak to, to hold, ‘nor possess. Neither were you anymore a factor in my life…if I got rid of you right. You would be erased forever. You would be nothing but a memory if I ever stopped to think of you. And as far done as I was with seeing you and being effected by you, I would make sure that I never did. I inhaled sharply.

         I was determined not to give you any more breath in my memory than you had breath in my life. Taking life from you, breathe, and reality, was the best way to get rid of you and so I did. I teeter tottered between sobbing, and breathing. Feeling and thinking. The tears fell from my eyes until I realized exactly this: If I didn’t finish getting rid of you, I would continue to suffer. Whether in a prison where I would be painfully reminded of you every single day, or simply here in the living room of our home where memories would haunt me. I would lose more time than I already have lost if I sat here any longer in the wake of our final argument. I did not kill you to have to feel pain. I did not kill you to have to cry.

         I stopped. I stood up over you. I dropped you from my arms and you slid from my lap hitting the floor with a lifeless thud. Tired of being around you, alive or dead, it was time to complete this process. I would burn you and this fucking house down with you. You would be out of sight, in order to keep you out of mind. Whenever I thought of you, the last thing I’d remember is that you are now ash. You are nothing. I would forget you, and all that you’ve done to me and I would move on. You had fears of being buried alive and waking up smothered in dirt anyway. It was the last consideration that I could have for you now, and so without even gathering any of my things, and without a plan, unsure if I even wanted anything else other than to see you burning from your existence in my life, I unscrewed the cap from a bottle of vegetable oil over by the stove.

         My mascara feeling like dried marker on my face, I knew I was done crying. With one hand I wiped the smeared makeup from beneath my eye then I shook the bottle of oil to pour out everywhere in front of me, emptying it as I looked over you, or what was you , while mixing surely flammable oil with your blood on the tile. While doing so thinking of all the ways that you were such a piece of shit. What I ever saw in you I definitely did not see anymore. I knew that you deserved every minute of this whether you could feel it or not. Everything about us. Our house, our music, our past and happy memories I wanted gone. I painted you with oil, the kitchen, and the front door of the house. Then once the bottle was empty, I opened the utility kitchen drawer finding your zippo lighter, flipping the top and throwing it to land perfectly on your corpse. The fires spread, and I stood there….

         Until I came back to reality. I was watching you pack all of your things, listening to you say all of your shit and waiting to see you walk out of the front door from our-...my bedroom, hearing the house go silent. In my head realizing you and all your games now had no worth to me. In a way I have killed you. Now I wish you your happiness in your own little Hell.