The Pain

"I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare."

― Ned Vizzini.

I've been thinking about Ross(a friend from high school) this week. It started out being about me(of course) and my (seemingly) overly ritualistic approach to suicide. But then I remembered what it was like to be depressed in high school, to wake up in the morning, lie in bed for a moment to count the number of hours until you can go back to sleep, to think about the amount of energy it's going to take to get through the school day ppretendingyou're okay and decide whether or not you had it in you; hours and hours of classes, hundreds of people who were supposedly just like you, but somehow seemed to exist in a different dimension entirely, all walking right past you without ever once even seeing you. Then coming home and spending more energy trying to listen to the people who love you, but don't see you dying in front of their eyes. It's such a chore to try to get through a whole day when it feels like your entire body is made up of lead and screams. It's hard to be around so many people who don't care that you're dying and not cry. Living is such a chore. I think she lay in her bed on Wednesday morning, calculated the number of hours until she could go back to sleep and decided there were simply too many.

I remember how that feels. But I never ended it, every day I just kept on getting up and going to school. I performed my chore because that was just the sort of girl I was.

The pain now is different, sharp and constant, like I'm being stabbed through the heart with a small knife a few hundred times a second. When I woke up this morning and had my "ten seconds of heartbreak", I thought about a scene from one of my favourite movies in high school, The Craft. There's a character in it named Bonnie who has mysterious burn marks over a large percentage of her body(the characterisation in that movie was a bit sloppy so there isn't much more information than that given) and she had to get some sort of stem cell treatment to try and get rid of them(if you know the technical term, pretend I used it here). One part of the treatment involved injecting the stem cells into the healthy tissue closest to the scarred tissue over and over again. There's a scene where they show her back being stabbed by the needle hundreds of times a second and she just lies there trying to keep still until eventually she can't hold the scream in any more. I'm good at suppressing pain most of the time, but in the mornings and at night, I feel like I'm Bonnie, getting stabbed over and over again because I just wanted to be normal. And I never scream, but I can hear the scream in my head, a loud howl of pain that I can't ever vocalise. I feel it building in my heart and travelling all the way down to my toes and then I start to shake. I close my eyes and try to lie still, but I can feel that I am no longer in control of my body, the pain is.