The Cold

The Cold

 

            As she lay soaking wet on the hard linoleum floor, she felt cold.

 

            She had the kind of goosebumps that felt like they were slicing through her thin pale skin one by one. She considered picking up her worn bath towel and shielding her body from the harsh world surrounding her but the effort seemed too great. Besides, she knew it wouldn't make a difference.

 

            The cold came from within. It spawned from somewhere deep inside her and radiated outward. It possessed every limb of her body, making it convulse in a way that would have been painful for someone with feeling.

 

            Every drop of the chilling bath water than ran off her body and puddled on the floor seemed to harmonize with a drop of life that slowly trickled out of a body that had reached its breaking point.

 

            She thought about the up and down roller coaster of her life, something common to do in the last minutes of life.

 

            To her dismay, she saw only a continuous path downward. Constant descending. A linear expression with a negative slope. Every attempt was a new coordinate that would be plotted further and further down.

 

            Failure.

           

            She desperately scoured her memory for a moment of success. A small victory. Something that would console her inner fears by whispering "It wasn't all for nothing," but there was no memory to find.

           

            She thought of the previous night. She had gone out with six of her best girlfriends. Girlfriends that had no idea what was buried inside their best friend, the girl who was the life of the party. The girl whom they all admired because every time she had fallen down she had brushed it off with her dry, sarcastic humor and gotten right back up.

           

            She thought about this morning how she had lingered in the doorway for a moment before entering and had listened to her friends' words as she had picked vomit out of her hair. They had been recounting the night before, passing pictures they had snapped of their best friend as she had laid topless in the bed of a truck, passed out in a pool of vomit to each other. They hadn't been able to stifle their giggles as they all had remarked "when will she learn.."

 

            What they didn't know was that she had learned. She had learned long ago that at first, the sickeningly sweet bite of cheap flavored vodka encompassing her throat as it became a part of her would sting but after four or five shots, it went down like water. When her brain was silenced by the hazy confusion of alcohol, she no longer had to silently battle with her miserable alter ego. She was just the funny girl. The girl that everyone loved to be around because she kept them laughing. Three more shots later, she was making a fool of herself and they were laughing harder. She wouldn't remember any of it the next day but even if she had, it wouldn't matter. She wouldn't feel hurt or embarrassed. She would still feel empty.

 

            Emptiness.

 

            She had brought herself back to present time and she had walked into the room. It immediately had fallen silent and the images on the cell phones had quickly been concealed. The conversation had turned to what they thought was a safe subject, the man she had brought home with them last night.

 

            They had begun to laugh as they pointed out the purple hickeys he had left on various parts of her neck and chest. Little did they know, as she had examined them in the mirror, giggling with a fake smile plastered on her sad face, that she had been crying on the inside. Crying because someone that had any respect whatsoever for her would not have left evidence of their passionless, yet still private, late hours of the previous night for the world to judge her by.

 

            Once again, the girls had jokingly scolded their friend with the catch phrase she was all too familiar with, though this time, it had been to her face.

 

            "When will you learn?" they had asked.

 

            "Ladies, I have learned. Thats why I'm the one that woke up with a sexy boy spooning me," she had replied cooly.

 

            As they had shook their heads with mock contempt, trying and failing to contain their chuckles, she had thought about her true motives for allowing herself to be taken advantage of the night before. She had thought about why it had become a weekly pattern throughout the past few months. She knew deep down she went through it all because she craved waking up in the morning with warm arms around her cold body. It would almost seem as if her body was desperately fighting to absorb some of the warmth that the strong arms around her were willing to sacrifice but majority of the time, her stone cold body would never cave and accept the heat. Sometimes, however, just for a moment, she would allow herself to submit to the heat and would momentarily fool herself into thinking someone was there for her. Someone who was there to hold her together and to offer her warmth in a cold world. Even if that person was passed out in a deep drunken sleep far away, they were a person and they were there.

 

            That morning, however, had been different. She had for the first time since she had fallen into this pattern, woken up to find herself naked in a bed alone. He had woken up before her and had snuck out, leaving her revealed with nothing but a thin white sheet to cover herself from the outside world and nothing remaining of him but a used condom he had left on the foot of the bed.

 

            The knot that had slowly been accumulating in her stomach for the past few months had suddenly become an unbearable pain. The voice that had constantly whispered in her ear "It was all for nothing. It is all for nothing. And all it will ever be for will be for nothing," had without warning become a yell that she could not pretend she did not hear.

 

            It was then that she had pulled herself out of bed and using every ounce of strength coursing through her veins had gone out to be greeted by the faces of friends that didn't know her anymore than she knew the man who had abandoned her in the early hours of the morning. She had faked it long enough for them to assume she was her usual, hung over, carefree self and then had walked out the door by herself. Alone.

 

            Loneliness.

 

            She had burst through the doors of her apartment in a hurry. She had rushed to get somewhere; she just hadn't known where. She had ran into the bathroom, not knowing where else to go, and had filled the tub with scalding hot water that she had felt obligated to immerse herself in before she caught hypothermia from her own body.

 

            She had been panicked when it seemed the moment the skin on her toe contacted the water, it seemed to turn to ice. She had ignored the numbness and sunk her whole body into the tub. When she could bare the freezing temperature no longer, she had thrown her body onto the linoleum in exasperation.

 

            As her life flashed before her eyes, she knew she had one last hope at succeeding. She could attempt to save the world from failure, emptiness and loneliness.

 

            She once again composed all the strength her body had left and picked herself up off the linoleum. Her shaking hands grasped onto the white, smooth surface of the tub. She gracefully stepped into the arctic waters once again. As she sank into the tub, she wondered how long it would take for people to realize she was gone and if the water would be frozen by the time they found her.

 

            As she took her last breath, she was certain it would be.