The Day I Died

by E.B. Black

Sometimes living is harder than dying, but that doesn't mean that being alive isn't worth it.

The details were right, but a small voice in the back of my head nagged that everything was still wrong. Time was running out. I could hear the clock ticking in my head, but I didn’t know what happened at the end of its countdown.

I had lived. And living meant that I had tried to kill myself and failed. It wasn’t even a possibility I had considered before now. I’d always known I couldn’t do anything right, but killing myself? I thought I’d at least be able to succeed with that.

“No, I just swallowed three bottles of pain reliever and sleeping pills because I thought they would make me high.”

Because I was always crying and just didn’t want it to hurt anymore. Because I was tired of always feeling like such a burden to everyone I cared about.

It was a tightness in my chest, yet a hole where something should be that wasn’t there, and a light-headedness as if I were watching everything happening to me without truly experiencing it.

“How could you do this to me?” she whispered. But I hadn’t done this to her. I had done it to myself, in order to save her and others from the burden of being around me anymore.

“It’s like there’s less color in everything. The sky is darker. The world is dimmer. Things that used to be fun, like singing, just make me tired now. I’ve been trying so hard for so long now that I deserve to rest. It’s selfish for you to ask me to withstand it when I can barely get out of bed most days.”

Maybe it wasn’t anyone’s fault. Maybe people just like to blame others for someone’s death because it makes it easier to deal with when they can be mad at someone. Maybe the only thing to blame for suicide is depression.

I know that it is silence that kills people, silence that rips people apart,