disclaimer All due apologies, cajoling, and groveling to Jeffrey Eugenides and Sofia Coppola. /disclaimer
It would have been a good way to go, comfortable and painless; classical, too, like an ancient Roman. She'd made it through one artery, she reminded herself, staring at the skin Mary had tried to cover with tape and bracelets. This time, there would be no such room left for error.
She imagined explaining it to her parents: Mom, Dad, I don't want to have to wait for the world to find me. I want to find it for myself. I don't want to live with no purpose other than filling the mold everyone's picked out for me.
She should leave a note, she thought; wasn't it what people expected of her kind? A few heartrending words on a tearstained paper, a few sentences of girlish handwriting explaining how the world was just too much.
But there was no sense in that. No sense in writing down things no one would be able to decipher. Her writing was always like that. She remembered half-dreaming and scratching in her journal, mundane words flowing from the pen while fantastical thoughts flowed through her head. Her mind always wandered then; written words could never compare to thoughts. She could flip through the pages and know exactly what she was thinking when she wrote each entry, even if the thoughts and words were totally unrelated--it would never make sense to anyone else. But then, she thought, that was her all over, not making sense.
I'm going now.
Maybe she should write a final journal entry?
She picked up a pen, put it down. There was nothing to say to herself she didn't already know. She paused for a moment, a slouched, solemn-faced, nail-biting girl of thirteen, whose eyes always seemed to be looking someplace no one else knew or cared to know existed.
I'm going now, I'm finally going.
The window was open. It would be quick this time, no waiting for life to seep away. Waiting, always waiting. There would be no more of that.
Cecilia stepped onto the sill, experimentally kicked off one sandal, and watched impassively as it fell to the ground. She shifted position, caught a splinter in her foot, and stood framed in the window like a macabre child bride, her dirty wedding dress rippling in the breeze.
Her life should be flashing before her eyes by now, if cheap novels and magazines were to be believed. Instead, she was thinking of her Celtic music, ordered by mail, a tiny sliver of the outside world that would never fit into any mold and certainly wasn't meant to fit into the house. The ethereal notes moaned in her ears, though she knew the record player was off. Cecilia opened her arms.
I'm going now, out of this world and into another; at least it won't be here. I'm going now, and no one will ever unlock the secrets of my mind.