“I can help you.”

“What makes you think I need helping?”

“You tried to kill yourself last week.”

“Oh yeah. That.”

“Would you mind telling me about it?”

“What, like why I did it? That kind of stuff?”

“Yeah.”

~~~~

I brought about my own destruction, that much I’ll admit. But that’s not to say I’m the only one to blame. It was my first time at a new school after all, and could I really be expected to fit in right away? I didn’t think so, and therein lay the problem. I waited too long to try to make new friends, and by then everybody had already become a part of a tightly knit group with no room for latecomers.

Sure, some of the other outcasts were willing to welcome me, but we’re called outcasts for a reason—we’re not exactly social butterflies. With them, I didn’t create the strongest of friendships. Sure, we talked during school, but nothing beyond that. We didn’t go shopping, or out to eat, or to the movies, or do anything else together.  We needed each other during school, but we were too used to seclusion to do more than that. Hanging out with them was my first mistake.

My second mistake was falling head over heels for Adam. He was in a couple of my classes, and sometimes he would talk to me. We never actually carried out an entire conversation, but somehow I convinced myself that he was crazy about me. Like I said, big mistake.

An even bigger mistake was asking him to the Valentine’s dance. If there’s one thing I regret doing, it’s that. It took me a week to find a chance to talk to him, and looking back, I wish it had taken longer. Much, much longer.

Because, see, he didn’t like me. Not even as a friend, really. To him, I was just somebody to say hi to every now and then. Besides, he had his girlfriend to think about.

Naturally, I was a bit depressed about the whole thing. I had no real friends, and I had successfully alienated the only normal person who ever talked to me. In addition to all that, my grades were slipping.

~~~~

“Is that when you decided to try and kill yourself?”

“No.”

“But—“

“Just…be patient, all right? I’ll get to that part.”

~~~~

So like I was saying, I was a little bit depressed. A little bit. Well, at the time it didn’t really seem like a little, but it was. I mean, I wasn’t at the point of needing to cut myself to feel better yet. That came later.

So after the initial shock over Adam, I managed to settle down into a routine. A very lonely routine, but it got me through the day. Now that I think about it, I’m not exactly sure how long that lasted. It might have been a few months, or it might have been just one. All the days just seemed to meld together. I didn’t have much to distinguish them by.

In all this time, I was neither severely depressed nor tolerably happy. I was merely there, balanced on the edge of a very figurative knife. I think what finally pushed me over the edge was Christie leaving. Christie was my outcast friend, and when she moved, I was alone. Still, I probably could have survived if my sudden vulnerability hadn’t attracted the attention of Lisa and her friends.

During lunch, Christie and I had always sat near them. We never spoke to them, and they ignored us in return. As soon as Christie was gone, however, they decided to have a little fun at my expense. Daily.

I’d rather not get into what I went through, but suffice it to say that the next few weeks included ketchup, a lot of ruined shirts, and some pretty nasty name-calling. What little part of school I had enjoyed, they destroyed. Lunch became a battleground.

~~~~

“And that’s…”

“Yes. That’s about when I decided I wanted to kill myself.  I had no friends, Adam avoided me, I was failing half my classes, and to top it all off, I had Lisa to deal with. What was the point of living, if every day was just going to be miserable? Why go through that all the time?”

The therapist nodded sympathetically and looked like she was searching for something to say. “You’re saying all this like it doesn’t apply anymore.”

“Well, it doesn’t.” I did my best to keep a straight face as she digested that.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

~~~~

As I mentioned before, the last straw was Lisa. I had made the mistake of bringing my journal to school, and she found it. I think you can guess what happened next. She read out the most embarrassing entries and didn’t return it until she had the whole school laughing.

As soon as lunch was over, I ran home and found the sharpest knife in the kitchen. I hid in the bathroom and for two hours wondered if killing myself was really what I wanted to do. Obviously, I decided it was, and dragged the knife across my wrists.

It wasn’t until I was half-dead that I realized I wanted to live. Seeing the blood—my blood—pooling at my feet really got to me, I guess. Filled me with that good ol’ survival instinct. I was faint with loss of blood and it was hard for me to move, but I managed to push myself into the living room where the phone was. I was able to call my mom before passing out.

~~~~

“And now, a week later, you’ve decided you won’t try that again?” She sounded skeptical.

I allowed myself a small smile. “No, I decided that when I woke up in the hospital. My whole family was there, worried sick. Parents, brothers, sister…I don’t think I’ll want to make them go through that again.”

“But what makes you so sure you’re not wrong? People change, you know. How do you know you won’t wake up tomorrow and think ‘my life still sucks, what was I thinking, this isn’t worth it’?”

“I’ve had a week to plan against that. I’ve gotten in touch with Christie on facebook, and we’ve been messaging each other after school. I got a tutor for the subjects I’m failing. I can’t do anything about Adam, but I’ll start eating lunch in a teacher’s classroom. I won’t have to face Lisa again.”

She still looked unsure.

“Listen to me. I almost died. I would have, if my stupidity had lasted another minute. But it didn’t, and here I am. Alive. And you know what? I like being alive. I like it so much that even if being alive means a life of misery, that’s okay. You know why? Because I’ll still be alive.”

The therapist stared at me. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, so I just smiled wider.

“See? Told you I didn’t need your help.”