I wish there was a way out. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t in pain, that I didn’t try to drown my sorrows in a bottle of whiskey and hope the piercing pain clenching on my heart would go numb. One year ago today I would have gone to extreme lengths to find a pistol and blow a hole in my brain but that was then. Three months ago I had “found myself” and to my astonishment the suicidal behaviour and self-hate began to desecrate along with my former self although It did not take me long before I began to suffer again. I wondered what it was like to be what society referred to as “normal” as I had lived my entire life shrouded in pain and sorrow. People went about with their daily lives as I endured a pain I believed would consume my very soul. Whilst I had swallowed some random pills and whiskey everyone went about as though death could not touch them, as though they were immune to deaths deadly virus.

The image of that day was not hazy as every person such as me would describe it. They would be lying through their teeth if they could not remember a day that was almost their last. It was a normal day, the sun shone down on the earth brightly. There was not a cloud in sight and the sound of birds chirping and children laughing filled the air. I was confounded by that day as it was benumbing. It was an ordinary day, no clouds in the sky, not a thunderstorm roaring above me. I had assumed that on my last day the world would roar with anger and that it would lash out against the people who inhabited it for what they had done to me. I had assumed it would be the darkest day and that humanity would scream and fall into panic after the realisation of what had been done to me. I had assumed but I could not have predicted that it would be a day just like any other. The world would move on without me. They would forget me and in fifty years’ time not even my memory would remain. I walked home on the sunny, cheer filled day. I walked past fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, strangers on the street. ‘They would be the last humans I would see’ I had thought to myself. As I arrived home I contemplated my demise. Whether I would down a bottle of pills and Whiskey or whether I would carve out my heart with a kitchen knife.

As I filled my cup with whiskey and readied my tablets I was surprised that I had lost my balance and fell on the ground. I lifted my hands up to my face to see they were coated in blood. I looked up to see a man dressed in black throwing my personal items into a brown bag. As my vision began to blur and I became short of breath I realised that I had been shot. I could feel the blood draining out of my body, layering around me. This was it. I had gotten what I wanted, a quick death. Even with my cloudy vision I could see the sunlight burn through my window and into my house. It was so normal, it was all too casual, I was just going to be another casualty in society. I lay there watching the blood coat around me; waiting for the pain to go numb. Tears began flowing out of my eyes but I tried to remain as silent as I could. It hurt; the pain was burning the flesh around the bullet wound. I couldn’t hold onto my screams for long. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to die. A moment ago I was ready to carve my heart out of my chest and now I didn’t want to die. Why couldn’t I do anything right? I couldn’t even die right. I believed that I was not meant for this earth and that death was the way out but the pain is too much. My whole body is hot. I was sweating and aching and crying but I wasn’t dying.

I closed my eyes and prayed for a miracle. I reopened my eyes to find that I was in a bed covered in white sheets. People, whom I believe where doctors and nurses began hovering around me. Their lips were moving but I could not process the sounds that escaped them. I sat there dazed as they examined me and thought back on my almost departure from this earth. At one moment in time I was ready to end it all and then the next moment I was clinging onto life. It had amazed me how quickly I had turned on my own views of the world in order to hold onto a life I did not want. At a point in time I had wondered if it was weakness, that not even I, someone whom despised the world and all of humanity could escape from its grasp because of the fear of death. I wondered if it was God whom had sent me a miracle, a pathway to happiness. But what had God ever done for me? If it was God why would I have grown up with such hatred and such pain? Would he have not saved me then? I wondered if it was the Devil that considered me a second son, the devil whom had grown me from agony and despair. Perhaps he had kept me here in order to despise the human race for the remainder of my life. I could not hear. I was forced to endure a lifetime of silence surrounded by the people whom had caused me great pain. I did not want to live but I knew I did not want to die either.