Suicide Notes

by Michael Thomas Ford

How come someone always saves the people who try to kill themselves and then makes them tell everyone how sorry they are for ruining their evenings? I keep feeling like everyone wants me to apologize for something. But I’m not going to. I don’t have anything to apologize for. They’re the ones who screwed everything up. Not me. I didn’t ask to be saved.

Am I lucky? Am I lucky that I didn’t die? Am I lucky that, compared to the other kids here, my life doesn’t seem so bad? Maybe I am, but I have to say, I don’t feel lucky. For one thing, I’m stuck in this pit. And just because your life isn’t as awful as someone else’s, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. You can’t compare how you feel to the way other people feel. It just doesn’t work. What might look like the perfect life—or even an okay life—to you might not be so okay for the person living it.

Why is it okay to put someone to death, but it’s not okay for those people to do it themselves? I’ll tell you what I think. I think it pisses people off when you kill yourself because it takes away their chance to control your life, even a little bit. They don’t like it when you end things the way you want to and don’t wait for the way it’s “supposed” to happen. What if suicide is the way it’s supposed to happen? Do they ever think of that?

Then I realized that I couldn’t think of anything to do because I really didn’t know what I was feeling. All week, I’ve just been not thinking much about it. Even when I’m talking about it, I’m not really thinking about it. I’m just saying stuff because someone wants me to. I feel like one of the characters in the movie Sadie and I watched the other night, where I’m playing this part but the words that come out of me belong to someone else because the sound is turned off and what I’m saying can’t be heard.

“If you look at it that way, there’s like a zero chance of being born normal. But think about it: Right from the start the odds are against you. It’s kind of amazing that any of us ever get here at all.”

“What’s so bad about your life?” she said. “From what you’ve told me about your family, they don’t sound so bad.” “They’re not,” I admitted. “They aren’t the problem.” “Then what is?” “I am,” I said. “I’m the problem.”

They move their mouths, but nothing important comes out. They just talk and talk and talk.

how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?”

Like at those supposedly cool clubs where some idiot in sunglasses stands at the door with a list while a bunch of posers beg him to let them in. But he only picks the really beautiful people. In this case, I guess he’d be picking the unbeautiful people.

I guess having a stuffed bunny for your only friend can get a little lonely.

I don’t know if I want them to fade. That probably sounds totally freaky, but part of me doesn’t want to forget what it felt like, even though it hurt. If I forget about the pain, I might also forget that it was a really stupid idea to do it in the first place.

told Amanda that we’d had a fight about something, but that it wasn’t a big deal and Allie would get over it.

Reason

Personally, I think they killed the bear because they were afraid of it. That’s what people do, kill the things they’re afraid of.

There I go again, jumping from fudge to bears. I swear, sometimes it feels like there’s this monkey in my head who runs around turning the dials and changing channels on me. One minute I’m sitting around eating chocolate chip cookies and then all of a sudden I’m thinking about bears.

I think that’s what happens when you look too deep inside for the truth. The poison comes out, and you die, even though you have beautiful glowing pieces of blue truth in your fingers.

like fairy dust that’s past its expiration date.

That made me think about the astronauts again, about how the air on Earth smells so bad to them. I took a deep breath and filled my chest with the cold air. It didn’t stink. It smelled great for a change.

I wondered if I’d looked as clueless on my first day there as he did. Now I was a veteran. An old-timer. I also wondered if he was looking at me and thinking that I was crazy, the way I’d looked at Sadie, Bone, and the others that day.

“See?” I said. “Honesty isn’t so great, is it?”

My favorite was this fish that kept swimming up to my mask and butting his head against it. I had no idea what he was doing, but when we got back to the surface the instructor said the fish was trying to fight his reflection in my mask. That’s how I feel being in this place, like I’m a diver looking at a bunch of really strange fish.

See what I mean about watching a lot of weird fish? Sometimes they look normal, but then one day they go and do something that totally surprises you—and it gets them landed in a place like this. I don’t think anyone who knows me would ever have thought I’d do what I did. But I did.