I drew my razorblade across my wrist again, the blood beading on the edge of a thousand memories that I couldn’t escape, a thousand memories that I couldn’t outrun.

        Numb.

        My arm had lost all nerve connections by this point, and all I could feel was the warm, red substance gushing out of my arm with the force of a river.

        The floor’s kind of cold, I thought to myself as I lay down on the bathroom floor, relief kicking in and firing through my bloodstained limbs. My heart slowed, and my breath with it.

        Relief, solid as a brick wall, came crashing down on me.

---

        Blood. I remembered being soaked in the red substance that pushed itself out of my arm, but I didn’t remember anything else.

---

        My mom was hovering over me, worry in her face, along with disgust for the way I had chosen to deal with my stress. She tried to hide it with a big, fake smile, but I could see it in her eyes. She really hadn’t known before now.

        “Hey, baby.” She smiled gently, her motherly warmth beating out the disgust.

        “Hey, Mama.” My voice sounded dry and rough, like I hadn’t had any water for a year. “How long was I out?”

        “About a day and a half. It’s two-thirty. PM.” My mom’s blue eyes smiled at me from the place in which she was sitting. “The doctors say you lost a lot of blood.

        “Yeah?” My tone was a bit sarcastic and bitter, and the look on my mom’s face was just devastating. Her big, blue eyes stared at me like I’d just done something that she could never forgive me for. I just sat and stared at her, unable to move, unable to breathe.

        Why didn’t she understand?

I stood, my head spinning from the look my mom had given me before she’d walked out of the hospital room, swaying from the morphine they’d given me.

        She’d just walked out.

        Couldn’t she see that I was sick, that I needed her help to get better?

        With a sigh, my heart fell, and so did my body, the loud bang bringing nurses into the room.

        “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I lied, my tears not welling up until they’d left.

        I sat on the floor in my hospital gown, crying like the infants in the next room.

---

        Michael Jackson.

There was a voice, whispering his name softly.  

        “What?” I asked aloud, thinking the voice was just someone in my room, messing with me.

        He’s coming, coming, coming… It echoed.

        The voice seemed to be getting stronger now, the whisper turning to a regular volume.

        The door to my room opened, and in walked a Mr. Jackson, his gentle smile melting my heart.

        He saw the fresh cuts on my arms, and gathered me up, his strong arms wrapping gently around my knees and behind my back. My nose filled with a fantastic smell, like flowers and orange nectar, but mixed with a musky undertone.

        “Come here,” he pulled me closer, and held me while I cried into his shoulder, the pressure just taking me hostage as the tears ran down my face.

        “Michael… I want… to die.” I told him everything that happened, how my mom had walked out when I needed her.