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.