The Only Road Out of the Country

Looking back it is all so easy to see: simple signs on the road to self destruction: Chicago 90 miles, Indiana Next Exit, You Will Kill Yourself.

Warnings flash before her eyes in lurid glowing colors on a gunmetal gray highway and Jane stares into the mirror before her.
“Tomorrow I will be dead.” She says to her reflection. The words fall down onto the pink tile bathroom floor and shatter emptily like the hollow cliché that they are.
Jane’s eyes slide to the razor blade held in her left hand. Sliver light traces it’s way across the stainless steel surface, waiting like dancers on a bare, minimalist stage. Waiting for her to do something.
“Get it over with.” Hisses her reflection. “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation.”
But her image lies: all that pale skin, hollow cosmetic eyes, she does not want to die. She just needs to sleep, eat, breathe, fuck. It’s too much effort. She thinks that she can not keep breathing. She will stop. There will be no need for slippery skin, pink muscle and crimson stains on that pretty, pretty ceramic floor. The spots would fate to rust brown before anyone found her. So much simpler not to inhale: starve her mistreated veins, blot out the world: fading, fading, gone.
Yes, she will stop breathing. Now.
Only, It doesn’t happen. Seconds pass and she is left there standing in front of the bathroom mirror feeling foolish, out of air and just a little sad. Jane looks at the blade again, it is naked without a razor to hold it and she likes how it throws off the light: quite pretty. Simple. So simple.
And she makes the first cut, steel disappearing into her flesh like it was newer there at all. The blade dislodges from muscle, but it is soon wrapped in skin again: she holds her arm against her as if the razor were a baby she would rock to sleep. Eventually her hands are too wet and red, she can not hold on so it slips away.
Jane sits on the cold tile. She presses her face against it as the chill spreads from the floor into her body.
“Tomorrow I will be dead.” She whispers.
She looks back and it is too easy to see: Chicago flashes by in a blur of gray and light, dark spreads across her vision as she passes Indiana. And Jane realizes that this is it: the only road of the Country.