The Day I Wanted to Kill Myself

I lay in bed holding a box of sleeping pills in one hand and a knife in the other. On my table next to the bed rested a pair of scissors and a rope that I had spent hours untangling. My eyes were fixed at the fan. The room was dark with all lights turned off; it was locked from inside and as is obvious, I was alone. In my mind there was a voice; she had lived there for quite a few years now. Earlier she used to visit every now and then but on a fateful (am I sure?) day 3 years ago, she came and never left.

The day I wanted to kill myself was a Tuesday in October. It was a not-so-hot-not-so-cool day and I think it rained heavily that night. Or as I really like to think, the skies were crying because I couldn’t. My phone was buzzing on and off because I had made the mistake of telling a friend what I was planning to do. It was annoying. I was trying to wrap my head around the idea of having to say goodbye to my family and my friends (well, I didn’t have any) so just my family then. But did I really have to? I sat there in the dark with eyes that had become so dry that there was not even a single tear to accompany the gut-wrenching pain that I was feeling in my chest. My mind was a plain canvas for the voice and she painted it with thoughts that were so red and so black—they bled and they were dark. I got up, walked across the room, checked the locks again, placed a chair below the fan, and then went back to rest on the bed. I don’t know why I was resting since that was what I would be doing forever after a few hours. But I was resting. My thoughts were having a war with each other and it felt like my head was going to explode. 12 years of low self-worth, abandonment, and heartbreaks had finally given up and I was ready. I was ready to go through it. I was ready to make that one loop; that one cut; to take those extra pills, to drink those extra tonics. I wanted to stop existing. I wanted it to stop—the voice, the thoughts, the pain, the dryness. I wanted it all to stop. Did it matter? Did it matter that I had everything prepared—I had the sharpest knife, the tightest rope, the strongest pills? Did it matter that I had oh-so-conveniently been forgotten and the world has moved on like nothing ever happened? Did it matter that finally on this day, I had mustered the courage to do what that voice had been telling me for 9 years? Yes, it did. It did matter. But none of it mattered more than the fact that the day I wanted to kill myself, I didn’t.