Crowded Alone.

I’m sitting cross-legged in my bathroom with a razor blade in my left hand and I’m staring at my right wrist. I can clearly see my blue veins, life flowing throughout. This isn’t so much a crisis as it is the culmination of my being. As the sky pounds the tiled roof and the world around me with the heaviest rain of the winter, my thoughts are as clarified as I can remember them ever being.

Thing is, when you drink and do drugs as often as I do, you can’t remember much. Truth is, that’s the main reason I do it.

What time it is, I don’t know, but I’ve been in her since around Nine Thirty making incisions into myself. Where I’m bleeding from is my right shoulder to just above the inside of my elbow joint. The cut is about three inches long and I don’t know how deep. Slowly, blood is trickling down my arm, toward the wrist that I’ve fixed my eyes on.

X marks the spot on my heart. Two long lines intersect to form a cross that centres on where I imagine my heart lays and from it comes little lines of blood all the way down to my pubic region.

I’m completely naked, by the way. Things wouldn’t be this clear to me if I wasn’t.

And this isn’t the first time I’ve done this.

Truth is, most people would be surprised by the things I do when I’m alone. Fact being, I feel more alone when I’m surrounded by friends and family than I do when I’m by myself. With people, I can’t hear myself think. Everything and everybody around me is so needlessly loud that I have to turn the volume up on myself so that I can think anything. Though when I’m surrounded, all my thoughts are muddled. That’s the problem. The noise of other people infringes so greatly on me that I can’t bare to be around anyone for an extended period of time. With so many voices all calling for attention, it hurts to listen and eventually I just walk away. I do this to friends mostly as they’re the ones I’m usually around.

And that’s what scares me. If I can resent my friends so strongly for simply opening their mouths, how am I meant to cope with the rest of the world once I’m out of school?

School is over for me now. I’m in the study period before exams. What is meant to be the study period. Problem is, I thought a few days ago about how unfair the exam system is and now I can’t get motivated at all for them. More of society’s bullshit being forced down my throat. That’s another problem. Always, I see so clearly through the lies and insubstantiality that society is. Governments, religions, media, schooling. All uniformed to control the masses. When you see so clearly through all that life is supposedly about, your reasons for living narrow slightly.

When you can see through everything, you see nothing.

Where I could be right now is at a bar with my friends. Why I’m not there is the noise, as well as the fact that I hate a majority of them. Always, they are acting depressed. Acting like they have problems. My friend with the money acts as if it is such a terrible thing that he has to work for it. He’s always whining about how hard the work is, how much it hurts and exhausts him to work the hours he does. Pain and exhaustion. I’d kill to feel like that. I’d kill to feel anything. Then there’s my friends in a couple. Sometimes fighting, usually happy. These two lovers stressing about school and the future. They’re so lost, dwelling on the prescribed garbage they’ve been taught is important that they feel unhappy. Scared. These two in a loving relationship with someone they can speak to about anything, with someone to hold them while they sleep at night. Their so-called despair mocks mine and I hate them for it.

My dad and his girlfriend are out somewhere now, which is why I don’t have to worry about them coming home and walking in on this just yet. I do worry though, thinking about how eventually, if I go through with this, one of them will find me.

The reason I’ve never done it yet are my parents. What it would do to them I don’t want to imagine. What I’d planned was to do this next year. What I hoped was that I could hold off until school was finished and I could go overseas. It was all set in my mind. I was going to go to a foreign land, anywhere, and make myself totally unidentifiable. Tattoos all over my body and face, shaved head, whatever. Then what I was to do was rent a motorcycle and find a cliff somewhere. As fast as I could, I was going to speed off that cliff and into oblivion. The idea being, instead of finding out about my suicide, all my parents would know was that I’d disappeared. The design of this was to stop them blaming themselves.

Options like this become completely viable and realistic when you’re numb.

Sitting here, bleeding, still staring, I can’t wait that long. On top of my continuing detachment from the world and people around me is the fact that when exams are finished I will become an adult. That means a job means voting means responsibility means more weight to the world that is slowly crushing me.

The thing about having your mind always crowded with thoughts is that you are permanently dissecting the world around you. If you think hard enough about anything, you can find negativity in it.

Starting to rationalize the situation, I tell myself my parents would be hurt more if they had to watch me slowly waste my life away. My only solace coming from overdrinking and acid trips. Though they don’t know that yet.

Why I’m doing this is many reasons. Detachment, boredom, hopelessness. For what seems like forever I’ve been completely numb. Originally the cutting was designed to end the numbness. To give me a moment of respite. As with everything though, it loses its effect. Music used to be my source of happiness, before I realised that I would never be talented enough to form a decent band. Then writing was my thing, until research told me the likelihood of ever being published was lower than my self-esteem after the repeated taunts from my peers in primary school. Drugs now had barely any effect on me at all compared to what they used to. Cutting myself was much the same. The pain was short lived, almost instantly pushed away by the numbness.

And I’m still staring, the blood from my shoulder is now a weird red snake slithering down my arm. My chest still marked with a bloody X. I mustn’t have cut very deep, as not much has seeped from the wound.

What I figure is, my Dad would rather walk in on my corpse laying in the bathtub than watch me bounce from job to job another unfulfilled slave. Another blank face amidst the sea of strangers. What I tell myself is, I’m lessening the pain.

Finally I decide it’s time. With my left hand, I move the razor to my wrist, I’m staring so intensely at it, now I’m curious as to how dying will feel. With the cold metal pushing softly against my wrist, I ready myself.

Then I hear a key entering the front door of the house. I hear the door open and close and my Dad and his girlfriend are speaking, laughing. And I can’t do it. Not with them here, in the house, What I do next is what I always do when someone comes home and I’m in this position. I turn on the shower and step into it. My thoughts are set on wishing I’d gone through with it earlier. Washing the blood away, soon I will be clothed again, my wounds out of sight, as always, and no one the wiser.

As Dad knocks on the door I say I’ll be finished soon. After this, I turn up the heat of the water pouring over me. The room is filling with steam and if I could feel anything, it would probably be burning.