In A Week I Will Be Dead

Chapter Thirty: Honesty

!!!TW!!!

Mentions SH and suicide

IF YOU ARE STRUGGLING, CALL THE SAMARITANS ON 116 123 <3 <3 <3

Myself

I interact with you on paper, but not verbally with spoken words. Because you don't understand. If I spoke, you'd mock my attempts at interacting. I can't formulate sentences because the words in my head are simply not formulated. I can't speak in large social circles because it feels like my chest is tightening but at the same time swelling up like a hot air balloon that just wants to burst at any minute. This is when the plug is pulled, which is even worse.

By Pulling the Plug:

Dear reader, have you ever experienced somebody pulling the plug out from under your feet? You must've done. Everyone has at some point in the lives. It feels like a sun burn from within, a small atomic bomb bursting under your vessels and imploding your sanity. All the pieces of debris flow down your legs and through your toes, hitting the floor with a thud.

The worst part is you know it's coming.

You say something, and like the wind it invisibly causes trauma and distress. The heads start to turn. The atomic bomb is released from the top of your chest and hits your stomach with a claustrophobic bang. The pressure, the incredible pressure, retracting and contracting as you try to stay afloat. You desperately try to avoid becoming a Hiroshima shadow, or a Pompeiian statue – but you know, like aging – it's impossible.

Then the fires start. The radiation of shock implants itself onto your face. You wonder to yourself what it was you said wrong. But there is no answer, just the realisation that reality produces people whose sole purpose in their pathetic lives is to simply make you feel: miserable, worthless, humiliated. Your face becomes numb from the heat, and drops and becomes as silent as yourself. The plug pulls, and the ashes and embers float down your nervous system to your feet.

They turn and laugh down a long tunnel, down which you sprint to escape before the walls close in. Just like that, a human being has been added to a list of jokes said, but never understood. Why is it funny that a chicken crosses a road to reach the other side? The reason: because it's not funny at all. The expectation to hear a humorous response allows a human to find it funny. So, by assuming that my life is a joke, others can find me quite hilarious. A sick and twisted sense of humour creates sick and twisted individuals. Or maybe, the chicken was wanting to cross the road because he wanted to do what I'm going to do soon. I'm going to 'get to the other side'.

'Why so serious? It was only a joke.'

'Why so serious? It was only a suicide.'

I wonder how much longer I have to live before the Belljar man gets me.

Noah

I make it to school in good time, because I was literally the only person on the bus. Nobody even wanted to get on the bus either; it was like the universe and I were working in sync for once. The only other people on the bus was this man who looked like he should be at a funeral (and I do mean in the coffin) and a woman in a reflective jacket. More witches and pixies to scare me. But their magic failed on me. I suppose that's part of the beauty of growing up, you become less scared of fantasy and become more scared of reality.

She's not anywhere. I poke my head around every classroom, and ask every single person, but nobody seems to know who I'm talking about. I mean, how hard is it to lose a person in a school which only has three hundred and fifty people? Apparently very easy. I go for my phone, and it's not in my pocket. Damn. Every time.