The floor was cold, a thousand little needles were piercing through her skin, momentarily still suffering the sunshine rays that gave her flaming red back a few days prior. Amy turned a watery gaze to her hands, relieved they at least had left their burning colour behind for a warm honey shade.
“If I have to die, let me be as fair as the moon.”
The makeup was still intact and the mascara vaguely blurred around the corner of her eyes, which was a crucial bit to make her face decadent yet romantic rather than neglected and scrubby.
Long hair fell soft on her shoulders, and a self-satisfied smirk shyly made an appearance on her lips.
She knew she looked exactly how she was supposed to. Men had been staring at her figure throughout the whole evening. Those drunken pigs that she was relentless in despising but whose gazes brought a perverted sense of pleasure. The acknowledgement of the effects she had over them vested her with power, and Amy had always been thirsty for it.
“Probably, this has been my last night in the company of those miserable creeps. I had every right to satisfy my vanity.”
Amy felt an instant sense of retch in her throat,
Perhaps it was because of that grotesque image of the men she had spent the previous hours with. Or maybe for the litres of alcohol down on an empty stomach…Or possibly for the fear…
No. Amy was not afraid, not anymore. She was profoundly disappointed. And miserable.
“I thought it would end better than this.”
She tried to think back to her life,
It hadn’t been so terrible. She accomplished something decent out of it- obtained a satisfactory degree and moved to another country. But the more time flew by, the more complex everything else was becoming. And before she realised it, the 28-year-old woman had become too slow to keep up with the world around her. And, although still young enough to reach more ambitious targets, or so it seemed in other people’s eyes, Amy knew she couldn’t do it. She was tired, too tired to keep fighting for short-lived breaks of happiness through a never-ending war.
Upon the promises sworn under the full moon on her far 16th birthday, between death and boredom, she would choose death.
Between death and the awareness that she had to live with her failures, death was the viable option.
Hers wasn’t cowardice, though. Amy despised cowards more than anything else, and damn the person who dared to call her that.
“It takes guts to end yourself.”
Anyway, she also needed a message, something akin to a sign from the universe.
“Should I live, should I die?”
The only way to have an answer was by defying death itself.
She barely managed to conclude her stream of thoughts when another more insistent retch of vomit forced her to run to the toilet and throw up. The head kept spinning around, nausea holding her tied to the WC. The urge to cry grew of a sudden.
“I cannot shed a single tear, or else I’ll have to fix my make-up once again, and I am way too drunk to assemble a decent work”.
It was time to take action, and, shocked by her willpower, Amy stood up not without difficulty.
“Alcohol, a love-hate relationship since my first wasted twilight”
The disinhibition, freedom, and carelessness that a couple of glasses of red could offer… Amy had never felt those when sober.
“But for fuck’s sake, I would gladly get rid of this combination of dizziness, nasty smell, and liquid calories.”
The young woman shifted her attention to the large mirror that, for too long, had been a further source of her self-hatred, and for the first time in years, she felt beautiful.
It wasn’t about her cheekbones, lips, hair or legs. It wasn’t even about her vulnerable charm as many people had called it in the past. It was a pure type of beauty, the attractiveness of youth and innocence. That same grace had abandoned her once she became a lady.
She suddenly pictured herself at ten and laughed at how light and full of hope she felt at that age. Her mother’s smile brightened in the reflection on the mirror, along with those piercing eyes that had been blessed by an intelligence they used to share and made her mum distinctly proud.
“You abandoned me. You left me here all alone.” It was not her mother to whom those words were directed.
“You abandoned me first, Amy. You set me aside, keeping me hidden for too long. You ran off to England, deluding me into believing we would become friends again, but you forgot about me once there. You knew, the moment you chose to become Amy, that you wouldn’t have any more room for me. So many years we spent taking care of Amanda to later toss her away for an addict with a fake name.
You said you wanted to be brave; you claimed to be a fighter. And you became the shadow of a ghost haunting you, but it’s just a phantom, Amy, and you could never see it.
You spent a life trying to escape Dante’s indolent crowd, only to become one of them.”
Amy did not have any more strength to listen to those words.
They were barbaric. They were honest. She didn’t have the strength to face her past. Would Amanda die with her?
Amanda, Amy…They were the same person, after all.
Amanda was the child. She was both her mother and her grandma.
Those trusting, shiny eyes and the French countryside.
Beauty, books, her sweetly crooked smile…The horror before violence.
Amy was another story. Born in the gloomy weather of England, Amy existed as an 18-year-old soul, with blue hair and ebony lipstick. Amy was LSD, MDMA, ketamine, those Amsterdam routine trips, how the end always justified the means. The teenage counterpart who danced high lost in a techno rave…
Yes, that was the right evening. They would both die together.
Amy opened her bag, prepared the medicines and stormed to the kitchen. The actions were profoundly mechanical…The time to be sentimental was now over…
Open the fridge, grab the vodka, have a sip,
And then another,
You need to calm down,
The medicines are here,
Will they be enough?
Only the universe will tell,
Take one,
drink,
swallow,
Take one more,
Have another sip,
Gulp it all down,
Once again,
Keep going,
It hurts…
“I am scared.”
You don’t have to be
“Who is speaking?”
I’ll always be here with you. Always…
Keep going, come on,
“I am beginning to feel sick”
It’s working
I see you!
“Mum, is this really you? Wait, I am not dead, though; Mathilde is also here. And dad! You are all so young! Grandma…
Please wait a moment. I know this place.
It’s my childhood home! The flat in Via Leopardi.
The parquet, the wardrobe room, I loved that Persian carpet.
It’s so beautiful. If I could draw happiness, I would paint this living room.
Jo, Lucy? You are also here. Don’t hate me, please! You were the best friends I could ever hope to have.
Sissy, I have missed you so much. You were the bitchiest and bravest dog in the world. Quincy and Watson, you are all here.
That’s Manù, my first pet, that poor cat whose tail I used to bite. How could I ever forget you?”
Memories begin to resurface one by one as they violently surge like the devouring fire of an erupting volcano.
And she saw her family, the dogs, her elementary school, those childhood friends she loved so dearly, her favourite books, Harry Potter, the Sundays spent at grandma’s house, her favourite lasagne, Antibes and that captivating sea, those unforgettable family trips where they were still all together and happy to be. Egypt, Vienna, Ireland, those constant moving in and out of too many houses without ever finding a home, Amanda only wanted to feel safe. And Isabelle Allende, those idyllic images she could create with only a few words: those books that kept her company as a fifteen-year-old girl estranged from her peers. And again, the magic, chess matches because she hated sports, adventure, Cambridge, and the beauty she had always sought. And her battles, those political ideals, the protests for a better world, and debates on how to build a more egalitarian society. Her King’s College acceptance letter…“I had forgotten about that!”
She even found her first half-smoked pack of Camel Light.
And beauty, again, who had never really left her.
And in those last instants, while life left her body for eternity, Amanda realised that had she had the chance to choose,
She would have chosen to live.
