Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.Another endless night with her screaming baby. He was only two weeks old and yet had been screaming for an eternity. Ear piercing, mind numbing screams. Screams that prompted the neighbours to yell “shut that baby up!” into the night.She was standing in front of an open window, rocking, rocking, rocking him, her mind unable to escape the torture of the moment. She visualised throwing him out of the window. Imagining her muscles moving to create the momentum needed to heave his little screaming body out through the window and two floors down to the concrete driveway.The thought that he could be dead in a moment was a calming wave. A feeling of sweet relief so instant and violent that she thought she would faint.
It could be over. Like that. In an instant.
Followed immediately by the undertow of guilt and self loathing that clawed through her gut like the heave of a bulimic’s relief. An agony of familiarity. Back where she deserved to be. Knowing her true place in this world. To be loathed. To be bad. To be wrong. To be underserving of life.
She placed him back in the basket. His screaming muffled by her determination as she walked to the bathroom and opened the cabinet.
She took down the makeup purse. Her insurance. Her precious out. And one by one she popped the pills out of their blister packs and swallowed them.
With each pill her calmness and resolve increased. This was the way things should be.
She would not be a burden to her sons. She would not weigh them down with a mother who was wrong and stupid and impossibly unimportant.
Her ex-husband had been right to leave her like that. She would do the same thing. She would walk out on herself.
20, 30, 40 pills later and she can barely hear her sons’ screams.
Sleep comes.
The end.
Except it isn’t.
Heaving and hurling and agonisingly expelling every possibility of redemption she wakes up in a pool of vomit and shit.
Failed again. Of course. Of fucking course. Destined to continue to realise her truth.
Floating through a blur of helpers. Patronising well-meaning helpers. Knowing that nothing matters now.
Every minute is about knowing that she can exit at will. Every room she enters invites opportunities not necessarily to be taken, but to be acknowledged as options.
If only they would leave her alone.
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