December
I remember a girl in high school did it. A cheerleader, the prom queen type. She took some pills—her mother’s Valium—and ended up in the ER. And the hallways buzzed the following school day with a burning question: Did she really want to die, or did she feel like she didn’t want to live? There’s a difference, apparently. The former is indicative of a much deeper problem; the latter understandably associated with a response to a traumatic event.
If I can’t be with Mark, if he doesn’t love me anymore, I don’t see the point to living. Over the course of our romance, perhaps every day we were together, I imagine I cut a piece of myself off like a strip of fabric, and worked that section of myself into and over and under him, so now, there is no way I can break away.
We are woven together.
It hurts. It hurts to get pulled apart by the seams, every thread exposed, every fiber raw. The only way I can end the pain, the only way to medicate myself, is to stop my heart from beating, stop my lungs from breathing, stop my brain from thinking.
I want to die. And I feel like I don’t want to live.
I don’t understand the difference.