For you

'Please don't hurt yourself.'
The walls begged me in their noiseless scream as I tried to melt the plastic from reluctant blades.
'But why?' I asked. Hoping beneath my hate that they'd give an answer that could save me. My hands shook with each rough forced flame, the flicker no more violent than the storm within my chambers. I wanted to die, but death was terrifying. No monsters or ghosts could cause me to feel my bones within my skin the way I did that night. But when I pondered waking in the morning I felt vile - day was my phobia, the anticipation of continuing hours; such seemingly endless torture. The walls were so soft with their pleading for my safety, but they spoke mainly of how little people cared for me. I was 'weak, weak, weak' and they told me with every note of their silent orchestra. And I could not argue. So ever present were my snarling shadows, accompanied by only deafening isolation. Yet in that incoherent hiss I heard them call to me, entice something long sleeping dormant beneath the first few layers of my worn out skin.
'Please.' I heard myself beg; 'Give me a reason not to.'
The paint on the walls seemed to sigh with thought. Even my own demons had no reason to keep me.
'Because of your deposit.' they spoke. 'Blood stains us walls.' The controlled pitch of how I was offered this causation led me further into demise. But my walls were honest and I could not bicker with them anymore, no matter how afraid I was now i had no one left to protect me. The flames beckoned death, like a rattling cart with the devil at its bit. He'd known where to find me for a while. I felt him watching, but the souls he reaps must first be diced. Here I was, a sous-chef's fetish. Yet my mind was strong at first and took decades to die - my body however, mere seconds. Did I have a deposit? Yes. The walls could not lie. I asked them, with the last breath of my lungs that belonged to the living;
'What should I do?' They thought for a few stolen beats of my heart, their mind my mind and therefore their life as false.
'Hang yourself. Please, do it for us.' I smiled at the vacant beige of my room, so plain and ordinary. I envied the walls with their inanimate innocence.
'Okay.' I spoke with my neck in a noose. 'I'll do this for you.'

Note

The internet tells me i'm depressed. I googled my symptoms nine times on the train to work; in between the cancer and the STIs this was a fairly agreeable diagnosis. Depression is fashionable now, models wear it on their tiny sleeves to explain their malnourished wrists. Celebrities with depression for the most part stay revered, just look at Kurt Cobain. Elvis was great but no one can think of him now without imagining his obese form slumped on a toilet, arteries clogged with goose fat, singing 'stuck on you' at the cistern as his life leaks out of his rectum. No one would ever impersonate Alexander McQueen or Ernest Hemmingway, there's no Sylvia Plath episode on South Park. There's a certain dignity to taking your own life, and such an innate sadness that comedy can't even mutate it. It's a comedic vacuum, a subject so abhorrent that no one dares play with it. However humanity loves labels, and I was branded with so many that you couldn't even see the cloth of my flesh beneath all the memos from child psychologists that were pinned to me.

On long train journeys I plan the words for my suicide note. Words became something I hoarded, collected from novels and journals to brandish again when the time came. Never sure whether to begin with 'dear' or 'to whom it may concern', most kids with this fantasy would brandish their addressee ' Mom' - but my mother doesn't need my apologies, she knows what lives inside me. She saw it with the eyes of her soul, eyes that were the trees my corrosive emotions fell not too far from. She's seen something ticking backwards in me since the day I was pushed out of her with a fleshy noose already wrapped around my neck. They say 'the miracles of modern medicine' saved my life that day. I say they wrongly imprisoned me, made me not long for this earth but forced to endure it none the less. For I grew up crooked. Some part of me never set straight. This world was a round shaped hole, I was a square set peg. The word clouds from the tear and blood soaked pages of my previous attempts to right the wrong of my birth are so apologetic. 'I'm sorry'. 'Please forgive me'. 'I just can't go on'. The more I must face the humiliation of survival, the more anger bubbles over in me. I blame the doctors that saved me, the women that reject me, the men that don't respect me. As the days dragged on the weapon with which I planned to vanquish myself changed, I found it grew more violent. From pills, to a cliff, from train tracks to a knife. So why did I buy all those bullets? If I only planned to kill myself? That is why I've written you this note, Dear concerned; to tell you that the darkness in me festered too long. It mutated and grew, and as weak as I was from years of abuse at the hands of it - I could not stop it. There is no blood on this page, but I'm sure by the time you read this my hands will be soaked in it. There are no tears tracked through the ink for the monster behind my eyes can not cry. But there is an apology, I am sorry I was born. I do not apologise for those I took with me. 9.5% of the population are diagnosed as depressed; the likelihood is I did them a favour.