His Gift, My Ending
Language: en
The parrot my boyfriend gave me was unnerving. Every day, it mimicked my exact voice to whisper bleak phrases: "I'm so tired. My head hurts. I don't want to live." Simultaneously, I developed severe insomnia. My hair fell out in clumps, and my weight plummeted from 110 to a skeletal 82 pounds. My doctor was baffled, comparing my body to a bucket with a hole in the bottom, leaking its life force into nothingness. When I begged to give the bird away, my boyfriend insisted I was imagining things. Instead of helping, he bought an even larger cage. It wasn't until I jumped from our rooftop that…