I wrote a page of words then hit CTRL-A and Delete.

Let’s try again. I’ll keep it simple.

(I was 15 years and one month and two days old.)

One year and three months ago, I slipped into my mother’s medicine cabinet.

I was completely alone (for a change.)

The Cranberries’ song “Dreams” played and The Exorcist was on.

(Never did finish that film.)

I slipped one white pill onto my tongue. Bitter, I let it lie stagnant for a second before pushing it down my throat.

(The remaining nineteen Vicodin followed their lost sibling: in pairs and chains of three or four, clasping together their dusty white hands.)

I expect I drank water at some point thereafter.

(I felt pleasant. Warm, fuzzy, nice. Obviously the effect of the hydrocodone.)

Then I remembered.

(Oh, the reeling horror.)

I remembered the truth about death.

The truth I had used times before (and since) to pull myself out of the suicidal whirlpool.

The truth was this: after you die, you decompose. You become molecules. Then scattered atoms, elements floating about the Universe. That was it.

And–the climax–this meant a boredom beyond anything Earth can produce.

(floating endlessly in a soundless place in a place without vision in a place without touch )

It must be infinitely worse.

So I turned myself in; they dressed me in white, and poured a chalky black elixir down my throat; it stained my pink underwear.

They instructed me to speak, so I did. I answered honestly (I cannot lie I DESPISE LIES THEY BREED PARANOIA THE ROOT OF MY INSANITY).

I heard they demanded to keep me a month, but I was let out in a week. They wanted to say I was psychotic (the council argued), but settled for socially anxious and majorly depressed.

(Haha.) That is the price of being a Thinker.

I am now 16 and four months and one day old. I am still emptyemptyemptyemptyempty. I am still wading (floating? drifting? whispering, existing?) through the dull (boring! so very lusterless!) world. I am still aware that countless atrocities are committed against others (WHY??? HOW CAN PEOPLE HURT OTHER BEINGS? I don’t understand!), and that no such tragedies have permitted me to live in my (comfortably?) miserable mental state. I know this (with guilt?).

But I cannot help it. Suicide remains my idle fantasy.