Suicide Notes

Sometimes, late at night when I can’t sleep, I read suicide notes. Maybe it’s a morbid interest in what people’s last words to the world were. Maybe it’s finally being able to sympathize with a group of people, even if they’re all dead. Maybe it’s my way of preparing for my own note. I don’t know what it is about them, but I love to read suicide notes. I’ve read so many in the waking hours of the morning that they seem to blend together. Like the one from the 16 year old boy begging his parents for forgiveness. Or the one from the old man who, with his last words on Earth, told his wife of decades that he had always hated her. Or the one from the middle aged women who threatened to haunt her ex if he didn’t give her younger sister the piano she left at his apartment. Or, my personal favorite, the one from a guy who said he killed himself for no other reason than he had a toothache. Some are funny. Some are cold. Some are downright heartbreaking. But I usually never cry, no I have too many of my own words to write on notebook paper to cry. But sometimes I do. I cry hard and it breaks me a little more every time, but what’s a crack in something shattered? I love the ones that make me cry the most because they really make me feel. I feel so much in those moments, so much pain. I feel the pain of the writer as they take their lives. I feel the pain of their friends and family as they read the same note I read. I feel the pain of the world as it loses another innocent soul. I feel my own pain. Sometimes I think all I can feel is pain. But there’s always one word that does me in, and it’s never the “I’m sorry”s the “I love you”s or the “forgive me”s; it’s the “Goodbye.”