The Last Year of Life

Day 22. Bathroom. 6:13PM.
A gnawing pain at the base of my brain made sleep uncomfortable. Mouth stuck together from the wine sapping the moisture from it. An arduous day at work. ‘You look like shit,’ said Bo with a mouthful of a complimentary greeting pastry. I say, ‘Fuck you, buddy.’ Show him my middle finger.
I cut my neck while shaving in the bathtub during a shower after getting home. I faintly believed that I was going bleed until I died from the blood loss. It happened in a quick burst- a stray stroke, a sting as my skin sliced, and then the red stream spilling down to my feet. The blood churned with the running water to make it lavish. Poetic. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve cut myself shaving before, and none had ever been this serious. My mind immediately darted to the impending fate I am to soon face, the quickly depleting ‘time I have left’, and I launched into a exasperated panic. Struggled to squeeze my hand around the slice to stop the blood dripping down my neck and chest. Heavy, labored breathing. And just as suddenly as it started, it ceased. I wiped the steam from the mirror and examined the wound. Nothing but a small nick much akin to the paper cut on my pinky that I got the other morning from Boris handing me a marginal printout too quickly. Fettered by mere paper. I looked back into the tub. The liquid in the bottom was swilling pink. I had seen that pink shade before in a tub. My brain recalled it through the billowing steam. It was the first time I was asked to perform oral sex. I was 19 and living alone in a small apartment. Not like my place now. It was dingy, had low ceilings and a smell of dirt and old bread that never faded. One wall was red brick and never warmed up. Cast the coldness about the whole place. Her name was the same name as a pretty flower and she was older than I, by three years, which made me afraid. She visited me from a far away city that I had never been to. One where they make movies and the people walk around with their heads down. She told me about all of the tall buildings, and how sometimes a guy yells for her to fuck herself from his window. We had sex the night she came in, and I could tell that she was not particularly impressed by my proficiency, but pretended to be enthralled anyway. Coached me the entire time- like a mother crouches in the corner of the room and calls for her pudgy toddler to waddle across to her, legs quaking, drooling. At one point, I dripped some sweat into her eye which stalled things greatly and inflated the already awkward aura of the act. I resumed, and then I ended. Uneasy and sparse conversation followed. Sleep came quickly and, soon, the morning. It was my hope that the discomfited night before would be washed away in the new day’s glow, but much to my dismay I would find myself bearing its crippling weight around my neck just the same. I woke up early to get a shower before work, and it wasn’t long before she joined me in the process. A second chance. Perhaps I might redeem myself. I was afraid again, but lapsed into the part. She was on her back and I was between her legs with the warm water straining against the back of my neck. I tried to go rhythmically and in bursts. I read that was what they wanted in a magazine in the supermarket checkout line one time. She told me I was doing everything right, but I have never had that confirmed nor denied. When I was finished she looked at me with big eyes. She was breathing heavily. I was breathing heavily. I saw the large pink stain from where her head was resting. She had dyed her hair two days prior and the excess color had washed out during our mingling, soiling the white porcelain. We laughed together nervously and I felt the electric of life sprinting through the middles of my bones.
I didn’t take the ride last night. She was pretty. I am lonely. She had tight curls and thickly lacquered lips. I could see boots that went up to her knees. I was drunk as shit. It would have been easy. The thick music coming from her car was inviting and loud inside my head. I was afraid.
It would have been appropriate had I died from shaving earlier. It is the most interesting thing I have done in the shower since I was 19.