Maybe I haven’t always wanted to die, but the first time I really thought about it and planned it out I was eight years old.  My family at the time (Father, mother, sister and me) were visiting my cousin in New Jersey.  He and my sister were close in age and often excluded me.  My mother wanted to be around her sister and my father was drinking with my uncle.  I was the odd one out.. And I have almost always felt like the odd one out for most of my life.  But that’s probably another story.  I remember being resentful, even vengeful.  “They will miss me when I’m gone!” I thought as I imagined hanging myself from the curtain rod in the bathroom.  I don’t remember how I justified myself out of that one but after crying alone in the bathroom a while I eventually came out.  I probably went outside to catch bugs.  Alone.

I thought about it often in my teenage years.  My mother was always abusive.  When my sister amd I were too big to beat on we were bombarded with guilt and verbal abuse.  We lived in a neighborhood right off of the highway and it was pretty much a circle of maybe two dozen houses.  A perfect cage to keep ua from wandering around town.  I spent a great deal of my time reading and I think that was what saved my life.  That and getting into music.  I also befriended the school misfits.. The goths and geeks.  I was still depressed though, and the antidepressants didn’t help.  My issue wasnt chemical, it was situational.  I often talked myself out of it by thinking of it as cowardly.  Because I had to in order to survive.  I kept a pouch hidden in my room filled with various random pills I would collect and store there.

I thought that being done with my childhood years would have released me from the tyrrany of circumstance and that I now had the power to pave my own destiny.  But here I am, a prisoner in my house with no car and few friends.  My body betrays me and I feel more like an animal than a person.  I will use my tax return to get a car.  But even then where will I go?  Will I look for love?  Who would love me in the state I am in?  I feel so beaten down, like there is no way back up.  Everything seemed so promising and then suddenly, after a spurt of heavy late summer rain, a car ran into mine.

I feel like the rain never stopped and that im slogging through a muddy pit, clawing for a way out.  I cant get out on my own but I can’t ask for help lest I accidentally pull someone in it with me.