Despite the tile I see through the foggy water, I feel like I'm dying. Once clean water spills from an overflowing bathtub and washes over my bleeding knuckles, mixing with my dirty blood from my wounds. I cough again, feeling a blend of saliva and blood drip from my mouth and to the flooding floor.
Even though the bathroom is well lit and the tile remains clearly white, I watch the floor morph in front of my eyes. Nothing but blurry, deep darkness fills my vision as I struggle to the surface. My eyes sting - is that the ocean water or my tears? - and my limbs ache, but I try to fight my way to safety. I can't fight. I thought I was strong. Not strong enough. I kick my legs frantically, but I'm sluggish and exhausted. Inky tendrils clutch at my quickly-tiring body, dragging me down deeper as muted screams tear from my throat. My lungs fill with salty water and chokes me. I reach out, as if I were so close to the surface, as if I could save myself. I'm too far gone.
Please don't let me drown.
I drag myself from the muck, my clothes clinging to me and weighing me down along with the black sludge that, despite trying to keep my hands and legs in place, slide from my skin and leave me cold. I heave, vomiting up water I had swallowed, and cough violently. I gasp painfully, tears of misery leaving my cheeks wet as they slide down my face and to the mud, where they steam briefly before vanishing. Attempting to pull myself forward proves useless, I can only drag my battered body a few feet before I look up and realize where I am. No where. As far as I can see, this black filth clinging to me stretches for miles in every direction; there was no hope for salvation. I saw nothing but it. I looked hard but I found no evidence of my life. My mind struggles through the pieces falling off to find something, my old muffler, my master, a love I once felt, anything. But there was nothing. There was no hope anymore.
There's no love here.
I slowly lay my bruised body on the wet floor. I don't close my eyes even as the dirtied bath water laps at my face and stings one of my eyes. I stare. I stare at the evidence of my life flowing out of the slit in my wrist. My slowing heart pumps blood out of the wound and, yet, I feel nothing. My vision is warped, my mind is breaking. What was once red is now gray; there has never been any other color. I don't cling. I let go of all the agony, the screaming, the tears. All of the hallucinations, the tired feelings are gone. I lock away the happy memories; the genuine smiles and laughs, the real love I've felt, I keep them all safe in the last unbroken piece of my heart and then I let go of a life of misery.
A bathtub left on for too long overflows, the once clean water spills over an abused body and mixes with the blood.