The first time he thought it it came as such a surprise. Just a quiet voice, almost from outside of himself but almost from very deep inside, that quiet, reasonable voice. 'You could kill yourself,' it said. And what that voice said didn't seem so terrible, it seemed almost like it would be a relief. A get out of jail free card that he had held all along.
Because at 13 he was in more psychic pain than he thought he could survive, and the surviving became all consuming, tiring, more than he could hold. The surviving became work, while his friends seemed to lead these carefree lives. They worried about grades? They worried about sports teams? They worried about if the girl they liked liked them? Craig began to look at them differently, with a jaded sort of jealousy and condescension. They didn't know about things that mattered. They didn't know what it was like to have your own mother die, to have to go to her grave week after week, to see the newer graves beyond hers, putting her life further into the past.
His mother had been dead for two years the first time he thought that he might like to be dead, too. Not that he thought he would see her, or wouldn't see her, that wasn't a part of it, not really. He just wanted to stop hurting. He just wanted the level of grief to go down one micrometer.
His father remained angry with his mother even after she died. 'How can you be mad at a dead person?' Craig wondered, looking into his father's small eyes. He knew that his father was angry with him. If anyone had seen the bruises then and asked him about it he would have said, 'I make my dad angry,'
He hid the bruises all the time, wore long sleeved shirts even in the nicer weather, faked his way out of gym class more than once because sometimes they played the games where one team would take off their shirts. And if he had to do that they would see. He pretended to be happy and the way he pretended to be was growing so far from the way he actually felt that when the little voice came it made perfect sense.
He held all his grief for his mother inside and couldn't even talk about her around his father. He had tried, slipping with little memories of her and his father would just stare, ignore his comment and move on. His throat felt dry and it was hard to swallow when his father did that.
Still sometimes days would go by when his pretending worked and he thought he felt okay, wasn't thinking about his mother, wasn't worrying about his father. Tried to worry about the things his friends worried about and almost succeeded. The bruises would fade, they would always fade and when they went away it was easier to fake the emotion for the fake life, 'I'm fine,' he'd think, 'I'm fine,'
It didn't last. His mother was still gone and he felt that like a toothache, dull and aching. His father would explode, the anger coming out of nowhere, never failing to take Craig off guard, and he'd stare at him with huge eyes. Backed into some corner, his father still so much bigger than him, and the anger was real.
When he was being particularly honest with himself, usually curled up somewhere after his father had hit him, he'd admit that he grieved for his mother and hated and feared his father and that things weren't getting better. He'd admit that before he could build up those walls again, could turn his thoughts from his mother again, could aim to please his father again.
That day with Sean in front of the train, that hadn't been the first time he'd thought of just ending it all. The train roared at him in its burst of sound, the light wavering back and forth and the horn blaring, all of it sounding like salvation to him.