This was written by my friend Jessica Windisch. I wanted to share it on my blog :) Enjoy!
The Nameless, Ending?
After he left, we were only two. Something was off balance; something was wrong. We went out; we tried to carry on like we used to, but we couldn't. Something was missing. She woke up at 6:30 every morning now and soaked in the bathtub until 8, she wouldn't eat, she wouldn't sleep. I could hear the water swishing against the sides of the tub and I could hear her crying as she moved about...she wasn't splashing, she was squirming, writhing in pain. She soaked in her agony for an hour and a half every morning, so she could hide behind an almost painless smile through the day. Fat lot of good that did her...
It didn't take long for me to get really tired of this tradition she had started. She was reminding me of Blanche DuBois and that's depressing; she and I, we needed out.
"Hey!" I yelled through the door, "open up, this is ridiculous!"
"I'm not done yet," her voice sounded almost broken.
"I'm comin' in, dude. You've got to stop this..." I said as I searched for, and quickly found, something to pick the lock with.
"Stop what? Don't come in here, I'm naked!"
"Like I give a fuck!" I walked in and there she was, curled up in a ball in the bathtub. "We gotta get out..."
"No, YOU gotta get out! I'm takin' a bath!"
"You're soaking. You're sulking. You're fuckin' pruning! You gotta get out of that tub and we gotta get out of here! We're breaking, this place is gonna break us. We gotta go."
"Where could we go?"
"Anywhere! Hell, everywhere! We gotta leave! Now! Come on!" I said, dragging her out of the tub. I grabbed her towel and wrapped it around her, "we're gettin' out of here. You and I! You hear? Come on and dry yourself off, we gotta go!"
"Wait..." she said; she was shivering, huddled up, gripping the towel around her shoulders. "We can't just up and leave."
"Why the hell not?"
"We gotta have money! We gotta have plans! We can't just leave, we don't even know where we're goin'!"
"That's the beauty of it! We don't need to know, we can just go. It's so easy to go when you don't look back! Just leave it all behind! Let's, you and me, just leave it all behind."
"...ok. One more night though, ok? I wanna stay here one more night...just to prepare, you know? I gotta say goodbye to the place."
"Alright...alright, one more night. We can spend the night saying goodbye to this, but we're gonna go first thing in the morning, right?"
"Right...first thing."
That was that. We spent the night in, nobody wanted to come over or to hang out. We didn't tell anybody we were leaving. That's how you do it. You gotta go and not tell anybody and never look back. That's the only way to do it. We spent the night sober, just taking it all in, I guess. I packed up and went to bed, ready to be gone once the sun came up. I got no warning before I found her in the morning. She didn't leave a note or a mess. She had cleaned up her entire room, as a matter of fact. Put away all of her clothes, all neat and perfect, made her bed, shit! She even did the dishes and cleaned the living room! The entire apartment was fuckin' spotless! And she was in the bathtub, face up and all her color, drained out. The expression on her face, in her eyes, it was empty...cold and empty. Next to the body, I found an empty bottle of Percocet and a half-empty handle of vodka. She didn't tell anybody she was leaving. That's how you do it; that's the only way to do it. Fuck, what do I do now?
I don't remember calling anybody, but there were sirens, Paramedics. I remember someone pronouncing her dead, but I don't remember the name or the face. I don't even remember if it was a man or a woman, but I remember them wheeling her out in a bag on a stretcher. I remember the look on her face. I remember those empty eyes.
I'm packing up to leave this place and never come back, I'm stoned as hell and my world is shifting. These halls hold so many memories and they're echoing off the chipped paint and the holes in the walls; I'm all alone, but we're all here. I see the faces and the bodies and the shadows walking through the rooms and somebody's making out on the porch. I hear the voices and the laughter, the screams and the crying, the insults, the apologies, the fights. Those were the days when we lived because we knew we were dying and thought we were invincible. We told stories we'd forget to have told so we could tell them again in five minutes. We listened to music we thought would never get old and we swore by the fashions that would never go out of style. We skipped our classes and went to the beach and drank. Those were the days of reckless abandon, the days of night-time parties and sneaking out of windows, when we thanked the heavens that the walls don't talk and prayed to the Gods our parents didn't notice we were drunk. I'm packing my bags now and remembering. I'm off to embark on the next journey. The same stories won't be told and the walls won't reverberate the same sounds. The ghosts of these halls will not call to me again. I'm high as a kite and I'll fly off with the wind if it'll take me all the places I talked about going when my walls were all that could keep me up without falling.
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