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The Bottle Looks Back

by LaShell Young

In Los Angeles California, there appears to be a lonely woman sitting and thinking how to end it all. With so many options at hand, she questions some of her choices and their cons…pills? But what if she doesn’t take enough? a knife? What if she doesn’t slit her wrist the correct way? A gun?, but what if she just makes herself a vegetable and her family is forced to care for her? Umm so many choices with real consequences, which she may not be willing to accept. The scenarios are endless, the options are many. But if she goes through with it does she leave a note and would anybody care? She thinks over her life and those memories make her shrink inside herself. On this bright sunny day she looks out and yet she see’s no blue skies with the sun shinning and radiating heat like an radiator. Nor does she hear the birds chirping and singing songs of pleasantry and happiness. She looks over at the bottle of vodka that seems to look back at her and through her very soul and as she gazes through that bottle and out the big framed picture window behind it, she see’s the cloudy skies. As the rain starts to pour into a torrent thunder storm. She see’s a girl in the distance about to drown in the fast rising water around her. Where are the little girls parents? Where are the other children? Why is this little girl outside all alone? The little girl is growing weary of the rising water that has gushed in all around her like a tsunami. Soaking her from head to toe she goes under once, twice maybe a dozen times and her head pops back up as she grabs and grasp for air. She can’t swim and she panics more and more with every failed attempt to stay afloat. But where is her help? Where are the people that were put on this earth to care for her? Where did her so called friends go? Why won’t the little girl just stop fighting with the water and just take her fate? The lonely woman answered her very own question at that moment, as she looked again at the bottle of vodka as it was looking back at her. She decided then that it is up to her to save herself from drowning, so she got up grab the bottle and poured out and down the drain the ever intoxicating liquid.

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