It’s over.

The sentence—and that’s exactly what it was, in every sense of the word—kept on falling off my head like a guillotine.

I died exactly eight months ago today. No, change that. I didn’t just die eight months ago. I was murdered. He failed to kill my body but he sure crushed my spirit.

At that time, I didn’t want to go back to work, ever.  I didn’t want to get back up.  I just wanted to go somewhere far away and hide from the rest of the world.

I remember being inside the rest room, crying and trying to dry my eyes in vain. I remember opening my compact mirror and setting it on the floor. It took three stomps for the mirror inside to finally shatter. I remember drawing out the plastic disc and all but one shard of glass. It was shaped like a tear, rounded on one end and sharp as a dagger on the other. I remember sliding down the tiled wall of the restroom until I was sitting underneath the sink. I remember dragging out the makeshift knife over my inner arm.

As soon as I did it, I wished I could take it back.  I mean,  only crazy attention-seeking girls cut, girls who walk like zombies through some teen novels.

But.

I felt the sting of my skin as it split. I felt the sting at the welling rise of blood. It hurt, but not as much as everything else. It was my first time to cut and definitely not the last.

I like to think that there’s still hope left for me or even for us. I want to believe that when life brings us to the edge of despair, hope is the only thing we can hold onto.  I think hope is a great part of growing old and growing up.

We might sound so cynical and bitter to the world but we know deep-down that it’s just a defense mechanism, cover- up coating the pains, hurts and longings. We resort to this kind of coping mechanism because it’s too embarrassing to admit that in spite of everything, we still kind of hope that whoever we lost or whoever lost us would one day come back looking around for us, asking for a second chance.

In spite of our false bravado and superficial anger and cynicism, we know (but we don’t acknowledge) that we haven’t completely given up.

Eight months. Who would have thought I’d make it this far?