8. Pink Water / Edgerton WI / March 95

It was quite a bit like washing red paint off of your hands. The vivid crimson quickly gets diluted with water and turns a carnation pink before it cascades down the drain.

At first I tried to lay back and just relax in the warmth. Waiting for the symptoms which had been described to me: first I would feel tired, then groggy. I would shiver and shake before turning white as a lamb. Next comes the cold; like when you're living on the streets and have no choice but to walk around all night until dawn. And then right before the end, as the last bit of heat is baked from your body, they say that you get warm.

But I felt awake and alert instead; overly cognizant. I didn't feel as if I were drifting any farther from the beach and if I were some part of me wanted to keep within sight of the shore. I even felt some panic and anxiousness. Doubts. I suddenly knew that I didn't have the courage to be claimed by the eternal sea and that this bathtub was not connected to it by any channel.

When I'd first lowered myself into the tub I really had felt tragic and despondent. I dragged the thin blades across my wrists and the slivery cuts, although not gushing, had leaked a poignant red; surely the color of a broken heart. But now, as I lifted my soaked head out of the stew, the flow of blood seemed to have ebbed. Even when I submerged my slashed wrists below the surface of the water, very little of the life giving sustenance contaminated the clear liquid. When I held the wounds up and squeezed more blood did trickle out. But unless I was actually pressing on them, the minor lacerations refused to bleed any longer.

Worse yet, I no longer felt noble and mysterious. I caught a glimpse of my crass face in the glass shower and I was embarrassed. I felt spoiled and childish. I had absolutely no need to feel sorry for myself or wallow in this troth of self pity.

Besides I had seen people who really wanted out: purple crescent moons underneath irises which blazed as yellow as rattler venom. The red lightning of blood shot veins streaking across the whites of their eyes. People who cleaved their wrists to the bone and watched all the hectic, terrific color leak out from their bodies in the time it would take for toast to brown and pop.

Me, I was just a showboat; a grandstander among the damned. A facetious tongue and cheek clay head of myself. I didn't have the balls to hang (from the noose) with those courageous sacrificial suicide lambs who were heroes in my book.

I got out of the tub and looked at myself in the mirror. There weren't even any drops of blood on the tiles. I pulled on a robe, sighed and un-popped the stopper. The pink water began to twist into a whirlpool and then swirled down the drain. I supposed that I would have to tape over the slashes so that nobody would know or else I could wear wrist bands like a tennis pro. See again, how could someone who was serious about offing themselves consider wearing wrist bands? Besides, I no longer knew or saw anybody in town much anymore. All my friends were either married, had drank themselves to death or had moved their trailers south for the winter. So there was no longer anybody left around here to gossip about me. 


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