I guess I don't like food, really. Or, that's a rather stupid thing to say. I don't like mealtimes. I love food. I intensely dislike, maybe even abhor mealtimes. Why do I, you ask? Well, it's not really that complex.

You see, when I was growing up, my family and I would have dinners together. My dad wasn't at those dinners often; he worked late. So, my family was incomplete, 5 days of the week. I never saw my dad then. My mom and my brother however, only made it worse. Don't get me wrong. I love them. I loved them even then. But my brother was a little difficult to manage, I guess. So they were always yelling at each other and I often got caught in between. My brother did not make dinnertimes easy for my mother, but then again, she didn't make it easy for him either, so both of them squabbled. Sometimes, I got mad and frustrated too, so I added in my own word - which of course, did nothing to help at all. In the middle of these terrible dinnertimes, for some reason, the old maxim would occur to me, "Treat others the way you want to be treated." And I'd ignore it, ignore the idea of saying, because I knew it would fall on deaf ears, and I'd get reprimanded and I wouldn't be able to hold my tongue. And the poor maxim would be stampeded on and defied and made to feel useless. So I never emitted a word after thinking about it. So, actually, mealtimes became a terrible thing for me to have. When I arrived at the table, I'd often not feel hungry. When I ate the food, it would taste uncooked and tasteless, and I couldn't even focus on it. My main focus would be to finish the food and not enjoy it, even though my mother was a great cook. I couldn't, didn't want to eat. The fact that I had to so that I wouldn't have to interrupt a rude exchange or have anger taken out on me just made it worse.

And I guess, now, when I get to the table, I just feel a little less hungry. My mother and brother turned out allright for all their quarrels, but I can never snap out of it. I don't remember anything, but I guess my subconscious does. My mind begins to make up excuses, but then, I sit myself down and eat a good lunch, and I taste my food because I am not focused on finishing it, and I can relish it. But the beginning is always hard. Sometimes, when I've had a bad day, their images will shimmer like mirages on the dining table in my kitchen. They fade away soon, but leave an imprint on my memory. It's hard to get rid of it. Maybe I shouldn't eat today. I'm not that hungry anyways.

I woke up to the sound of pounding in the hotel room above me. I was sick and pissed, that on a lovely day, everyone got to go to the beach, but I got to stay home and cough my guts into the pillows. It was disgusting. That was it. I'd had enough. I was going to get up, go upstairs, and tell whatever kid that was jumping up and down on his parent's bed or playing canoes with a chair that I was sick and I wanted my sleep. If his parents were there I'd look sternly at them too. 

I got up and made myself look presentable but slightly dissheveled so that I'd look the way I felt. I walked to the elevator, which had stopped at the floor above me, and then made its way down to the ground floor, from where it could take really long to get to me, thus decreasing my chances of being justly annoyed. So when the elevator stopped, I promptly got on and didn't notice a thing. Except for, of course, the ridiculous small red stains on the green carpet. Who made an impromptu attempt at redecorating?

I walked impatiently to room 2020. At first, the pounding sound didn't seem to be, well, pounding anymore. I thought of letting it go, but, while I was here I might as well give it a shot. I rapped so hard on the door, my knuckles stung, and the door swung open more than it already was. I looked inside to see who was there, and screamed. 

She was lying on the floor. And I don't remember her face, but how I sank to the floor, utterly destroyed by one little flutter of the eyelid. And my eyes fell to the wooden floor, with red running through the cracks, filling the empty spaces with its thickness, clogging the air with the scent of evil. That is all I remember now. The red, vermillion brilliant colour, seeping through the cracks.

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I have given my testimony now, I won't be needed. I can go away to someplace else, forget her, forget those cracks, forget how the air smelt and how my heart felt and how I thought I was dying for want of air...

No. I couldn't, actually. They all told me that they'd help me, but I pushed all of them away. The pyschologist told me these things happen and we move on, so I moved on from her. My mother told me she loved me and would do anything to make me forget about it, so I forgot her. My best friend told me he loved me and he'd take me away, so I went away. From everyone and from everything. I move alone from hotel to hotel, wondering that maybe, one day, I won't be afraid of the pounding in my head, that I conjure up sometimes. Maybe one day, I'll look at the wooden floor, and my vision won't turn red, maybe one day. It still hasn't happened yet, but until it does, I will not stop.

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I can't do it. The red is filling the cracks faster in my dreams now, every so often it spills out and I drown in it. For her, at least it is over, I have to live on. I thought I could keep travelling, but green money is not much to a girl whose dreams are filled with red, bright red. I closed down my bank accounts and mailed my mother the last of the money. To my bestfriend, I sent a picture of us smiling, at the time when I thought that life did not have the colour red, it need blues, greens and pinks to make you happy. And for me, it did. But red, red changed it all.

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I go back to hotels with wooden floors again. It is fine now. I swirl the last bit of the sleeping tablets in the red wine. I have been mixing them in for an hour now, because I like watching the white fade away eventually and the red take over. There were so many white tablets. None of them won out and stayed white. None. I laughed at it, surprising myself because I haven't heard myself laugh in 5 years. It used to sound like a tinkling; I had a tiny laugh. But now it sounded dead and tuneless, like bells out of tune, sharp and discordant, dry and brittle. I haven't talked to anyone in over a year now, resolving to plain gestures, pretending to be mute. I let it go though, because I do not want to know what I sound like, dry and raspy or careless and coarse. I watch the last tablet swirl out in the wine, and I roll off of my brown plush chair onto the floor. How like the floor she lay on, I wonder. I note every single crack in the floor, each gap, each swirl of the wood. I lay on my stomach, like she did, and drain down half of my red wine. My head suddenly feels dizzy. There were many after all. I shrug it off, but its hard, so instead, I let my arm drop. The wine runs through the cracks, just like her blood did, thick and runny. The smell of it clogs the air and I sniff it all in because in a moment I won't be able to. Outside, the sea crashes and fades away, just like my screams when I saw her. I close my eyes to the sound of this, and the wine bubbles on, bright red in the cracks.