“I’m not proud of what I did. The people I killed - their deaths - a casualty of war. The truth is that I wanted people to listen. I was tired of being ignored, of being one of the voiceless. Do you know how hard it is to make people understand that sense of indignation, worthlessness and feeling of being trapped? No. Nobody understands. That’s the problem.”
When I woke up that morning, I never anticipated that, by the end of it, I’d be wielding a gun to my own head with police snipers trained on me and spotlights shining like a glowing visualisation of the unknown. I knew I was depressed. I was lethargic, lacking the motivation to even clean or wash myself. I hadn’t brushed my teeth in four days, I hadn’t showered in longer. I was unshaven, unclean. I felt like the whole world was against me and I had no route out of the enclosure I was trapped in. I had no life to speak of, nothing but computer games and pornography. It wasn’t much of a life.
It all came to a head when I received that letter. Rejection isn’t something I deal with well. I was unemployed. I was another statistic for the government, someone to label as ‘long-term unemployed’. I was a victim of circumstance, of course. The economy never truly recovered. I was trapped between two worlds, the pre-crisis economy of boom where graduates were picked up like fresh meat for the grinder and the post-crisis world where graduates needed experience, not qualifications. It was a vicious circle. I couldn’t get experience and so I couldn’t get a job and so I would revert to type.
The letter just pushed me over the edge. It was another rejection letter, the kind of generic, self-styled letter that everyone who receives it knows that they haven’t even been considered and that this is just some compensatory notification. I never felt like they even gave me a chance. I decided to take things into my own hands. I walked out of my apartment with a pistol in the pocket of my jacket. It was so simple, just walk into the offices of a government department that had let me down so badly, that had placed me on a shelf and labelled me as ‘helpless’. I didn’t even mean to start firing, I just wanted to scare them, to warn them of their emotionless, detached attitude that left people feeling alienated.
By the end, there were four bodies I could see not moving, another three were struggling. I don’t know how many bullets I fired. I could smell the smoke of the gun and the barrel felt warm to the touch. It was like an out-of-body experience. I wasn’t there. My body was just host to a homicidal maniac that wanted to end the lives of all those who had described him as nothing more than another statistic in a long list of people trapped between a rock and a hard place. That’s what I told myself. I never meant to do it.
“What have you got there, chief?” One of the officers asked, looking at the rotund man holding a piece of paper in his hands.
“I don’t know. It looks like a note, almost as if this was all planned.” The larger man replied, the transparent latex gloves pressed against the white of the paper, tainted only by droplets of blood.
“What does it say?”
“It says... ‘I’m not proud of what I did’.”
“Oh, jesus. Just another person who let things get out of control?” The slim officer asked as he knelt down next to the body of a young man in his early twenties, his body covered in blood and bullet holes and a pistol in hand.
The body was young, youthful but unclean. His beard was scraggly and untamed. His face showed signs of age past his years and he had a frown on him that said to the world he’d given up long ago. The pistol was just lying there, a reminder to everyone that there were people out there ready to give their lives, just to be noticed.
