The Bell Chime

by Mona Kabbani

She both hated and loved how carefully he tiptoed around the subject of her mental integrity. Like she was a rubber band stretched so thin and his hands were made of knives.

But happy thoughts don’t create art. They don’t let you bleed out best-sellers.

And for whatever inane reason, she couldn’t part with the thing that instilled so much fear in her.

All her life, ever since she was a young girl, she has been told that she is a beautiful crier. That even in the climax or wake of her most painful moments, she expels them into magic. Funny, because it seems to be that she is in a state of tears more frequently than not, and she supposes it is a good thing then that she does not cry ugly. That at least her depression is beautiful. “Are you depressed?”

Tears streak its face, although her cheekbones are dry. It cries and cries and cries . . . and then it begins to scream. Its mouth unhinges, contorted with a violent pain. A black hole down to its very depths.

Her chest, heaving like a trampoline, stills. Her eyes and mouth settle, and all of that fear churns into disbelief. Into self-hatred and shock. Reflecting on how far she’s come and how easily she’s let a single episode break her down. Crumble her into thousands of gray matter chunks that leave her mind in shambles.

Read my mind like you always can do. He knows what’s best and she yearns for him. For him to be near and for that smile to make the maelstrom disappear. But this is all you. You ruined yourself and her self-hatred grows enough to make her turn away. Convince her she doesn’t deserve to look upon that which is so perfect. That which she does not want to destroy along with her sanity.

She stands, and a spark of sadness bursts from her chest into all the crevices of her body. Tears vomit out of her soul and pour down her cheeks, but she does not bother wiping them away. Why attempt to dry an ocean?

Lauren looks up at her mother. Loose strands of white hair from stress and fatigue stick out from her messy bun. The bags under her mother’s eyes are deeper than her own, and Lauren wonders if some layers of concealer could fix those dark spots right up. If she could cover up what she’s done to her mother with the simple sweep of a brush.

Her heart rate has gone down and she is looking at a planter of budding stems. It’s late spring and these are late bloomers, but sometime soon they will bloom. Unfurl their delicate petals and greet the world with an open heart.

They stare intently into the space between them. Each of them thinks about how stubborn the other is being. How one needs to move on and the other needs to stay put. Because despite her mother’s best wishes, she isn’t ready to let go. And despite how hard it must be for her, her mother wishes she would. But that’s not how pain works. Instead, it wedges and expands, increasing space until it’s impossible to see who is on whose side.

She bites the side of her cheek to keep from hurting. Physical pain is better than the emotional turmoil, but sometimes it still bubbles over. And the more she thinks about not crying, the more likely she is to cry.

How many nights has she had like this? Where one little word or wrong question triggers her? Where she cries herself to sleep because she can’t deal with the eventuality. The eventuality that everything is just as it is, that there is no explanation. No rhyme, no reason.

Upside down, it means have faith. Have hope for the future. Don’t lose your grip and fall into nothingness. But what good is a future if you don’t want to live in it?

You are alone in this and you’re being left behind.

No eyes are on her. As she sits in her train seat, body trembling, no one watches her. Curious eyes wander but immediately dart away after processing the scene. Those who would watch her on any other day avert their gaze. Because no one likes to acknowledge someone in pain.

He wondered so deeply that as much as he wanted to be attached to her by the skin of their souls, he wondered if they could ever survive each other.

You don’t just get to come into people's lives and bulldoze over them! I didn’t ask you to decide what I need or don’t need and I didn’t need you to take my fucking property. Now I’m piss scared without any comfort because you made that decision for me. Literally, how fucking dare you. How many more things do you need to destroy until you’re happy Dylan Werner? And in that moment, Dylan realized that no matter how much he loved something, he would always destroy everything he touched. When Lauren thinks back to that night, she thinks about how unimportant it was in the grand scheme of things.