Suicide Notes

by Michael Thomas Ford

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.

If my mother hadn’t come up to see me, and if my dad hadn’t known what to do, I really would have died. Three weeks ago, that’s what I thought I wanted. Now things seem different. Not totally different, but different enough that I guess I’m glad they did what they did.

No one ever tells you that when your heart breaks, you can feel it. But you can. It feels like something has crumbled inside you and the pieces are falling into your stomach. It hurts more than any punch ever could. You stop breathing, and for a while you can’t remember how. When you finally do, it feels like your throat has closed up, like you’re trying to suck air through a straw.

It makes me a little mad. I mean, straight guys don’t have to sit their parents down and tell them they like girls. Everyone just assumes that they do. But if you’re gay, everybody makes this ginormous deal out of it. You practically have to hold a news conference and take out an ad in the newspaper. Why? Just because it’s not what most people do? That doesn’t seem fair.

Why should my parents know? So they can get used to the idea of not having a daughter-in-law? So they can practice imagining me walking down the aisle with a guy? I don’t get it. Why is it that you have to warn people about who you are? Why can’t it just be something that happens?

mean, if I’m going to go to all the trouble of being gay and everything, I might as well tell people.

It’s sort of perfect, when you think about it. Isn’t falling in love a lot like losing your head?

If you ever have to tell your parents you’re gay, there’s only one thing I can promise you: However you think they’ll react, they won’t.

He said that I have to remember that even though I’ve changed a lot in here, I’m going back to a world that hasn’t changed. That’s going to be the hardest part, I think, seeing all the people who were in my life before. They don’t know what’s happened to me. They’re going to expect to have the same old Jeff back. But I’m not the same old Jeff. I hope they’re ready for that. I hope I’m ready for that. I’m still kind of a mess. But I think we all are. No one’s got it all together. I don’t think you ever do get it totally together. Probably if you did manage to do it you’d spontaneously combust.