Pinkish-Orange

    You know when your hands get wet... That glossy look, that glare they get in the light. Small white blobs of reflections that perfectly contour the shape of the liquid on your hands. Still being able to see your hands through the film that covers them. This feeling is new, well. It's familiar, but I still haven't seen it quite like this. For some reason my hands look like a different color than when they are covered in water. You see, with water- I still see well... my hands, like the normal color they are- with a bit more gloss. But with whatever this new sensation is, my hands are changing color... Normally a sandy beige color. But now, it's somewhere in between pink and orange. I can't think of a name for it, or any other way to describe it... And even stranger, near my finger tips I can't even see my hands, or the skin below- It's just these blobs of pinkish-orange. Even with the light shining on these buildups of whatever it is, it remains dark. Almost like a navy color, but it's not blue- but it's still that dark, saturated, pinkish-orange. I don't really know how it happened either. One second my hands were fine and now they are just covered in this fluid. 

    I was looking at myself in the mirror, just pondering the idea of free will, the ability to love and hate, the war between the heart and the mind. But what I found myself questioning most was the vastness of emotion. I'm sad... not just now but generally- How can I feel happy at a party with friends but so overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the concept of this thing we call life. How can I enjoy the moment but hate what the moment resides in. It's like hating a book but loving one page. My opinion on the book stays the same, but something about that page stood out. Then the mirror was broken. There were triangular shards hanging onto the edges, clamped down to the cardboard on the back by the cheap, silver, plastic frame. but in the middle- well there was no middle. Everything in the center has collapsed into a pile of layers of glass near the bottom edge of the mirror. With some smaller shards in the sink, that had fallen in. 

    My eyes came back into focus and my depth perception had sharpened, as zoning out has made those features slightly askew. Whereas before everything was flat, it felt two dimensional, as if everything in my frame of vision was flattened out in an orthographic way. It was blurry, on top of that. Everything was a fuzz and there was a mix of color where everything overlapped into an obscure gaussian blur. It was then, once I had come back to the sink and the what-was mirror, I saw these kind of cool looking markings on my forearms and hands. It was so strange. When you moved from my elbow to my wrist, there was this sudden line where my skin was dry and clear, to where there was this neat pattern. There was just one line before, where my skin changed color, with the dark bead leading it, getting smaller as it traveled. Then there were two lines, that diverged at first but came together and merged to one line, more skin discolored and a bigger bead at the end. I don't know where this pinkish-orange paint-like substance was coming from, but it was a sudden split where my arm was dry, and then my wrist and hands were discolored. 

    It came with a sensation as well... Now this I can say was new, I can't think of anything like it- But the best way I can think to put it is a burn. The surrounding area of that weird part of my wrist burning, like I had held a flame onto it or something. But it stung too, like a thousand small needles tracing the area the pinkish-orange stuff was coming from. It wasn't that bad at first, but the more I thought about the burn and sting, the worse it got. 

    It also made me feel weird. Ethereal I would say. It felt like I was weightless, but under immense pressure on all sides. It felt like someone was squeezing my head on every point of the surface. My eyes flickered and faded between that state of blur and fuzz, along with tipping a balance between a three dimensional, and two dimensional world. My head felt heavy, a bowling ball on my slouching shoulders, bouncing up and down as I juggle it in hopes of it not dropping like a rock, hitting the surface of my white, porcelain sink. My arms felt heavy, logs connected and joined at my torso. Pivot points that sank below the edge of the sink, with my brutally discolored hands limply laying on the surface. 

    I snapped back into it for a fraction of a second, resetting my position back to how I was before the overflow of blood, the liquid of life, and a slit on my skin, my tissue, muscle, and reaching to my arteries. Slicing my nerves and tendons on the way. A river of red. Red. Red! The color in between pink and orange. The oxygenated blood pooling in my hands and on the tips of my fingers, dripping onto the sink- in a polka-dot pattern of death. The burning around the slice grew in waves. The fire and sting of a million hornets poking the canyon of skin, the raised edges of tissue relieved of tension and elasticity of uncut skin. I drift in and out of consciousness, my head bouncing, my eyes rolling, my breathing getting heavy- and my body heating as if it were on fire. My stomach churned, the feeling as it someone was mixing my guts by hand. Caving in violently as the muscles contracted with the feeling of blood loss. And before I knew it, a minute passed in a second, and I could no longer feel my arms, numb with a majority of the rest of my body. Pins and needles combined with simple nonexistence. My vision and sentience come to, only for a moment. My hands were pale, I couldn't feel my arms. My skin ached. My sink went from white to red- And the only thing that caught my eye was the shard of broken glass used to slice my inner forearms. The brutality of thought slipped by the guards of my consciousness, a terror attack against myself. A decision made not in anger, sadness, confusion. Rather, a decision I didn't know I made until the realization of what had happened was the final thought to cross my brain, leaving not even a moment to writhe in regret.