April did it all wrong, really.
I've spent a while thinking about it lately – a lot time, honestly. April went about it the wrong way: just a main gash across her wrists allowed her to bleed to death, yes, but there are much more effective ways to die while maintaining that same romantic air that slitting your wrists undeniably has. A horizontal cut across the veins achieves the ultimate goal, but after what was probably an hour of waiting, waiting as you watch the blood draining from your body, staring blankly at those red rivers emitted from your arms. When I found April , she was still alive, lingering somewhere in between a cognitive state and unconsciousness...
You see, I've figured it out. If I were to kill myself – and I won't deny that the thought has crossed my mind several times – I wouldn't do it that way. It takes too long, and I've never had that much of a tolerance for pain. I would go about it differently...see, if you went vertically, I'm sure the time involved would be significantly decreased, because instead of just having one opening for the blood, you can just continue slitting the vein open the whole way up your arm. It really does make a lot more sense than laying there in agony for hours, wondering when it's going to end, your whole "life flashing before your eyes" moment having been over for 45 minutes, as you lie in the bathtub, bleeding to dead slowly as boredom takes hold.
That's a fairly amusing thought, really, waiting for death, getting more and more bored every moment. I've never liked boredom much, either.
But this is all purely hypothetical, of course. I'm not actually planning on killing myself, as of right now, although with all the time I spend contemplating it, it'd be somewhat expected and about time. It just seems like there's got to be something more than this, maybe. Or maybe I'm scared to die. Maybe I just don't have enough the energy to kill myself.
I think the last one's the real thing.
Mark's always staring at me now. But god, how the fuck can I blame him? I'm pathetic now – I just don't have the incentive to do anything. I sit around in the loft with my guitar in my hands, never playing. My hair's grown out terribly long and it's everywhere and unwashed and faded – it's been about six months I've had it cut or bleached, and you can easily tell. I haven't shaved in god knows how long. Sometimes I forget to take my AZT, and sometimes I purposefully forget. It'd be quicker to die without it, right? It's just like going vertically instead of horizontally. But then Mark notices and fucking freaks out, asking if I've been taking it, counting my pills out for me and watching me take them. The thing is, it just doesn't matter anymore. None of it does.
I know Mark's worried, and that he hates seeing me this way. I see how he tries to get me to talk, to make some sort of sound, but he doesn't get it. He doesn't see what an enormous struggle it is to put together two words, to rasp out a small answer to his constant questions. It's easier to sit there and pretend I don't hear him...but I do. I hear his concern, his anger at himself and the world, his despair, the fact that he doesn't want to lose me and he already has. I hear him sobbing in the room next to mine after trying unsuccessfully to get me to converse, crying bitterly, sometimes angrily, occasionally hitting something – perhaps the wall? – anything to get out his frustrations. I try to respond to him, feeling guilty later, trying to make him to see that I do care, that I am trying. Even if I don't and I'm not...
I've turned into a skeleton, a shadow of the boy I was. It's like I completely skipped over the majority of my natural life – I go from being an excited, ambitious kid to waiting for death. I never really grew up, I never got that type of maturity that seems to have taken over Mark lately. Sure, I'm not a happy little teenager anymore, but I'm perfectly aware that my depression probably looks more like teenage angst than anything else, just because I don't know how to deal with it in any other way. I guess that's what happens when you're given your death sentence at 19 years of age...you don't get a chance to grow up, you just linger in your state of scared immaturity, waiting impatiently for the day you finally die.
My first 'anniversary' of April's death is approaching quickly...maybe it's time I start talking. But after so long, I don't know that I'll remember how to form the words in my mind and deliver them from my mouth. Maybe it's time I leave the loft, but it's been so long that I don't know where I'd go, what I'd do. A year ago, when I was diagnosed, they said I probably had around two years left. So this is most likely going to be my very last year on this earth.
And the scariest part of all is, I simply don't care. Only one more year to endure...one year and then maybe this endless exhaustion will meet its match, maybe it will be over, once and for all. But I don't care that much, either way.