” What’s the use of a title”
They don’t make it
the beautiful die in flame-
suicide pills, rat poison, rope what-
ever…
they rip their arms off,
throw themselves out of windows,
they pull their eyes out of the sockets,
reject love
reject hate
reject, reject.
they don’t make it
the beautiful can’t endure,
they are butterflies
they are doves
they are sparrows,
they don’t make it.
one tall shot of flame
while the old men play checkers in the park
one flame, one good flame
while the old men play checkers in the park
in the sun.
the beautiful are found in the edge of a room
crumpled into spiders and needles and silence
and we can never understand why they
left, they were so
beautiful.
they don’t make it,
the beautiful die young
and leave the ugly to their ugly lives.
lovely and brilliant: life and suicide and death
as the old men play checkers in the sun
in the park.
One of the last times I confessed to a person that I wanted to commit suicide, this is the reply I received.
Additional discussion proved that this Bukowski’s poem so gently sent to me wasn’t meant to indicate any sort of acceptance of my decision, but it just stated that I wasn’t meant to die young, as my place in the world is definitely the one of the “ugly”, of the “old man playing chess in the park”.
I have been walking on a dead line and fighting deadlines I purposely created for a very long time. It is going to be 12 years in a couple of months.
Spending twelve years wishing to die when you are about to turn 19 means that you spent the majority of your life rejecting it. Rejecting love, rejecting hate, rejecting, rejecting.
I have gone through a lot of abuses, psychological and physical, but this is not the reason why I want to quit, why I have always wanted to quit.
A few days after my 7th birthday, I wrote on my diary: “Dear diary, there is something I really think you should now: I really can’t do anything and because of that I would really kill my self “. Let’s say that things didn’t change much from then.
I have always been considered a weirdo. There were times when I seemed also to arouse some interest in other people for appearing “different” from the other kids of my age, but most of the time people would just freak out and keep me out of their life.
I believe that there was a time where I was indeed quite clever. I started walking at 7 months, and when I turned 2 years old I could speak like an average child of 5. At five years old I could speak and reason like one of eleven. But this wasn’t either a source of joy nor pride. My mum generally tried to ignore me, and when she didn’t she was genuinely afraid. My father wanted be to become some sort of genius by keeping me every night awake until I would learn by heart these poems, or those equations. While my mother has always had a rather passive character, my father was always very aggressive. He would hardly ever physically beat me, but constantly verbally hurt me, and , despite i tried with all myself to make him happy, I was never “good enough” for his standards.
When I turned 5 this new baby-sitter arrived in my life. She was such a nice person and always made me and my brother play with her…but her games turned into something else some months later. I have been sexually abused by her, and occasionally my brother, for almost eight years. When I turned 5 I also started going to school. Where I live, you usually start at 6, and my great excitement soon turned into fear and rejection, as, being the younger student in the whole school, I was constantly bullied by all the other kids. Besides the jokes, they wouldn’t let me drink, they would throw toilet paper at me when I went to the toilet, and throw food during lunch, and throw stones during break. I remember feeling extremely mortified once, when these guys where chasing me, easily reached me and one of them commented “Damn, it’s not even fun with you. It’s just too easy to get you”. I have never really talked to anyone about this, as I believed that they had their own good reasons. After all, I really was the youngest kid in that place.
These physical, sexual, and verbal abuses soon turned into something else. I began to develop a binge eating disorder at 6, put on weight, and got even more abused by everyone: the other kids, my father (who was “really disgusted by my appearance”), my brother, my relatives, some teachers… The first time I purged I didn’t even know I was entering into another type of eating disorder. I was just sick of everything and everybody.
So I didn’t have any friend, and the few kids i would occasionally play with kept using and abusing me as much as they liked. I started vomiting mainly because it was a very impressive reason why I couldn’t play with them anymore. I would also try to get the flu everytime I could, because the games with the baby sitter would stop then, I didn’t have to stay with those annoying kids and my parents would come back home earlier to make sure I was alright.
At 9 years old I began to experience the joys of self harming. I would always try to get some scratches, I particularly loved the ones on the face, and I would engage in dangerous behaviour, like jumping off a high branch or a high wall. I hated going out, as I was fat, and could spend hours in front of a mirror crying.
I made my first serious suicidal attempt when I had just turned 12. I was in Dublin and I tried to jump off this college’s window. I still cannot understand why this girl grabbed me. Everybody just found me a horrible freak. Another girl had expressively told me a few hours before that I was “just too ugly and fat and stupid to have any hope of doing anything with my life”. Since she was almost 18 and to me she represented a much more mature and reliable perspective I had taken her words for true. Now that I am 19, even if I find what she did extremely pathetic of her, I still reckon she was right.
So, things just got worse later. I stopped vomiting and began refusing food, when I turned 13 I started cutting myself and lost some 20 kg in less than a year. But Although I was as lighter than some kids back in 6th grade I still considered myself fat. I started having heart problems and panic attacks. My heart stopped beating a couple of times and those were the best moments of my entire existence.
I lost the count of all the times I tried to suicide. I just know that there’s no day I don’t wish I was long dead.
I seriously don’t know what’s keeping me here. Â I guess that a part of me doesn’t think I deserve it.
When I was 12 I would spend entire nights crying under the bed, begging God to take me by his side, but despite how much I tried, how many pills I took, how much I starved, I always survived. I stopped believing in God, as I couldn’t cope with the idea that even the entity who is supposed to love us all wouldn’t help me.
I spent the last years of highschool planning to leave on my 18th birthday and suicide somewhere away from home, hoping that people would believe that i got kidnapped or something. Although my parents care about me as I am their daughter, and not as the person I am, I know that suiciding will break their heart.
I can’t bear taking such a responsibility, but i can’t even bear living.
I haven’t accomplished anything in almost 19 years. I feel old, so terribly old. I have wasted just too much time. I passed my final exam with no excellence, and I have recently quit university as I found it just too mortifying.
I have done nothing by hurting the few people I cared about and who might have some regards for me.
My first important boyfriend suicided, because I wasn’t even able to provide a decent support.
My 18th birthday plan got screwed up, because I met this boy who really needed love and hasn’t realized yet how little I am worth.
Because, trust me, I am really not worth considering, living, anything at all.
I am just empty. An ugly empty, mediocre shell.
There is nothing I am good at. Nothing I can achieve.
I have put back on the lost weight and I still struggle in a love-hate relationship with food.I loath myself with all my strengths and I find everything about me just too disgusting to have the right of being .
I have no grace, no beauty, no meaning, nothing. I am not an interesting person, I am nothing.
I seriously have no hope.
This is why I gave myself this ultimate deadline.
After visiting my boyfriend (who probably won’t be such for a very long time to come) I will spend every single day in this area near where I live where there is the so called “triangle of death”. The higher incidence of cancer in whole my country.
As I don’t want anybody to think I intentionally died, getting a cancer seems the only solution. It might take some time, but I have no doubts that walking between radioactive material will have its results in a decent time.
The alternative would be to get a boat and chase some sea wasp. Possibly far from the coast, making sure I tie my leg to a heavy stone or something not to be found anymore.
Why not just drowning? Thing is, sea wasps give you 3 minutes of crazily intense pain before killing you. I guess that I deserve it, after wasting soo much room for 19 fucking years.
I don’t even know while I wrote all this things nobody will ever give a shit about.
Mainly, because I have seen that a lot of people who want to commit suicide actually went through horrible experiences. Everytime I read them I feel so broken hearted, because I can tell they are wonderful people, but have seen and lived too many horrors to find any hope in life.
I have gone through some horrible experiences, alright. But my story is different, as I am the real guilty for my destiny.
I was a smart kid, once. I could have made the right choice, at least once. I could have changed things. But I haven’t. Because I am weak. I am just too weak. And I hate that I have waisted so many opportunities other people, so much more beautiful than me, didn’t have.
I won’t die as one of the “beautiful” of the Bukowski’s poem. I’ll just die as an “old man in the park”. Yet, I cannot stand living, when so many beautiful, so wrongly, die.