We Don't Believe What's on TV

Chapter Thirteen - No Words

I drifted in and out of an irregular slumber when I didn't care whether what I was seeing was real or not. Tyler's hands covered me with a sheet. He thought I was asleep. Ha ha.

I was sure...I was only sure I was going through the symptoms of...something. Lying on these cold tiles and not caring to get up must mean something. Everything has to mean something. Everything I do and everything you do has to mean something. It has to mean something. Because if it didn't, you and I would be useless. And somebody would make it mean something. Like the stars. Like the patterns of rising smoke or some shit. Like cards. None of those things ever had a meaning until we forced one upon them. I don't need a meaning, but I had one forced upon me, and my meaning is a face of happiness and helpfulness and dorkiness and someone you can get through hard times with. But who will help me?

Nothing has to have a meaning. We give it meaning so it will have purpose. Nothing has to have purpose. But it does so we can have meaning. Reassurance. I hate myself for everything that comes flooding into my consciousness at night.

This is who I am, right now, and maybe I need help and maybe I don't and maybe I'm just drunk or maybe I'm just hungover, and maybe that doesn't mean anything. I need to sleep. I am sleeping.

A breath escaped my lips and my fingers went tapping across the floor. This, too, this odd habit of mine, was known to everyone. I had given so many pieces of myself to the world.

I couldn't tell if I was sleeping or not. Please, please let my current thoughts be dreams. Please, let me be drowning in the gossamer threads of dreams and fantasy dimensions, not in my real thoughts and prayers.

There's everything wrong with you. There's everything wrong with me. And that's just the way it is. Just the way I like it. Just the way we have to accept it.

And if we don't, what's left?

Nothing.

That didn't make any sense, did it, Dan.

The thing is, I feel like the people who kill themselves aren't being selfish at all. I know firsthand - when they die, what they think they're providing is happiness for everyone else, a void where they don't exist so no one has to struggle with them. I want to provide happiness for somebody. For Phil. He'd like it if I stopped existing.

People don't kill themselves for themselves. People kill themselves because they think the world is so much better off without them in it. So they leave, thinking that they've left a more pleasurable life behind them for the rest of us.

It's okay to want to die. It's not okay that others are suffering after your death.

I am thinking horrible things.

Look how much of wreck you are without Phil. Look how helpless. How gormless. I was cracked like the bottle across from me - oh, it was gone. Tyler must have retrieved it.

"I'm OK." I stared into the air. "I'm OK without Phil. I am not mentally unstable. I am OK."

I was starting to feel OK. I was beginning to feel rationality creep back on me as the day brightened. All that was left was a headache and a heavy weight settling in my chest. Oh, ha ha, don't forget the thoughts. The thoughts were still there. The monsters in my head that told me to die. That I was stupid for not killing myself at the age of sixteen. I tried to counter them, fight against them with the solid future I had, my financial situation, how great my life was.

How great my life had been. With Phil.

I took a deep breath and let it out in a hissing noise between my teeth as I opened the bathroom door, stepping outside.