I put my arm around her and guided her to the bathroom, where the tub was waiting with clouds of steam wafting up.
“All right, I’ll be downstairs if you need me. Just holler if you want me to get you anything.”
“Marcus, wait. Don’t leave me.”
“Well I shouldn’t be here while you—”
She let go of the blanket, letting it fall to the floor around her ankles. I had lost track of how many times I had seen her naked body, but now with her standing before me in the flesh, she had never looked more beautiful.
“You’ve already seen me like this, it’s ok for you to be here. Besides, I want to keep talking to you.”
She stepped into the tub and settled down, letting the last of the dry blood and other liquids wash off her body and grant her unclothed form a beautiful shine. She purred in happiness as she submerged herself in the hot water, letting her whole body soak before she brought her head back up and laid back, with her long crimson hair listing and twirling around her body like seaweed around a mermaid. Seeing her breasts floating on the surface with wave after wave gently lapping at her delicate flesh was firing up hormones inside of me that I never even knew I had.
“Marcus, please tell me… why did you try to kill yourself?”
“I thought you read the note.”
“I want to hear it from you,” she whispered desperately.
I sat down on the edge of the tub and was silent for several moments. “There are people all over the world who suffer worse than I do: infants dying of starvation, kids used as sex slaves, adults forced to watch as their families suffer with nothing over their heads but the roof of their hut. I admit, even my life could be far worse than it is now, but there is a key difference between those people and me: they are capable of being happy. They have the will to live and the ability to smile. Me… there is nothing in this world that can bring me joy, I am physically incapable of being happy.
For most of my life, I have not known what happiness feels like. Even as a child, I could never bond with others and I always felt out of place in the world, like I was incompatible with this reality. My real depression began eight years ago, when I was constantly teased and ridiculed by those around me for no reason. I was simply picked at random to be used as a punching bag. I was tormented for years on end, but the ones who brought me so much pain never got the punishment they deserved. In order to “give me a reprieve from my torture”, I was transferred to a school for troubled kids. That place was hell, with the screams of the mentally disturbed echoing down the hall. It was like being in an insane asylum but with homework. I lost a year there while my tormenters still faced no punishment. For a year, my mind rotted, up to the point where I even began to hallucinate.
I was desperate for a cure to my anguish, something that would make this frustration and constant torment worth it. I decided that the only thing that could possibly bring me peace is love… or death. So I searched for love, for my soul mate, trying to find the one girl who could take away my pain, for even when I was just a kid, my heart ached. My loneliness, depression, and anger poisoned me. Toss in hundreds of hours of forced psychiatrist sessions and prescription anti-depressants that didn’t do jack-shit, and my life lost its light.
What I’m about to tell you is something that I have not told anyone. I was so desperate for relief that I even took a blade to my own flesh. It was not a suicide attempt, but I was hoping that I could cancel out my inner pain with outer pain.”
I showed her the scars on my arm and Angel placed her hand on the faded lines and gave me a look of deep sympathy.
“No matter what, I could not find a human that could be my salvation, so in my sorrow, I developed a deep hatred for humanity. I’m disgusted by my species and I wish that humans would just all die out. I’ve even given up on finding a soul mate because every girl I met was just too heavily tainted by the world to do anything other than disgust me and trigger my loathing. But with my loneliness still plaguing me, I knew that my suffering would continue. With my mind filled with chaos and the world always stuffing my mouth with the taste of ash, I decided that death’s sweet embrace was the only thing that could bring me peace. The only reason why I didn’t kill myself then was because I did not want to put my family through the pain and grief,
Then… a couple months ago… I collapsed into a seizure. I was in more pain than I thought possible, all of it coming out of the blue. I found out that my brain is riddled with tumors, focused mostly on my brainstem and limbic system. All these years, my limbic system was basically being smothered by useless tissue, leaving it incapable of producing chemicals like serotonin and other compounds needed in order for the brain to feel the emotion happiness. No wonder I had always been miserable; I was basically a car running without oil.
The other tumors, the tumors on my brainstem, had finally grown large enough to interfere with my nervous system, causing full body nerve stimulation of pain receptors. For every second of every day since then, I’ve been in indescribable agony, constantly downing painkillers and fearing of my numerous daily seizures. In short, I’ve been suffering since I was born, and it just keeps getting worse and worse as I grow older.”
Turning around in the tub and moving over to me, Angel placed her wet hands on my cheeks and pressed her forehead against mine. Her touch, her tending loving touch, essentially made me melt in happiness. Yes, happiness, only with her did I finally know what it felt like.
“Marcus, I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be, you saved my life.”
Angel stared at in surprise.
“I was half dead from a pill overdose when I heard you slamming on the door. My body kick-started and I threw up the pills. I would be dead if it weren’t for you.”
“But I thought you wanted to die?”
“When I found you, I found the will to live. While I was waiting for you to wake up, I was eager to meet you and hear your voice, to see you smile. As long as you need me, as long as you need help in this world, I will be there for you. I refuse to die as long as there is something I can do to make you happy.”
Crying now with tears of joy, Angel wrapped her arms tightly around my neck. “Then if staying with me will make you happy and keep you alive, I will never leave you. You saved my life, so I will save yours and stay with you forever.”
Her words brought a wave of emotions through me, so intense that I was practically shaking. With no one else on the planet could I have bonded so well, not in a century, let alone a single hour. This girl, this true angel, we had been in love longer than she knew and her feelings were pouring out, even with her memories having yet to return. Once her memories fully came back and she remembered the life we shared before her physical arrival, our lives would become paradise.
We stayed in that bathroom for as long as the water was hot. I told her about my family and recanted some pleasant memories, and while she listened and scrubbed herself with a bar a soap, I even shampooed her hair. Eventually, her occasional yawns began to grow in frequency and I could tell she was feeling sleepy.