Going On

Theo

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I sat down in the meeting room, trying to piece together the chain of events that had brought me to the damned place.

From what I had gathered since the beginning of the meeting, as lots of sad looking teenagers with loads of mental problems marched in, it all started because of math.

Fuck math.

A girl sat down across from me, with her hair in a messy brown bun. She looked around the room, and her eyes focused on a stapler. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I was about that stapler: “I want to staple myself to death.”

Considering that she was in a suicide recovery club with me, I assumed she was.

I went back to thinking about math as a really thin, pale guy sat down next to me. He looked me over, as though he was trying to decide if he wanted to have gay sex with me. I thought about saying “I’m into girls, sorry,” but decided he was probably just trying to imagine me dead.

I’d done that many times myself.

I thought about math, and how it had ruined my GPA, and how that made me stress puke, and how that made me start thinking about drowning myself by shoving my head in a shallow toilet bowl and flushing for a few minutes until I was dead, and then about how I later realized that jumping off the bridge in the middle of town would be a hell of a lot easier.

The leader came to the front of the room, shushing us even though no one was talking.

“So you’re here because you all tried to kill yourselves, is that correct?”

I laughed bitterly, imagining some kid standing up and going “Oh shit, this isn’t cooking class? That explains the lack of knives and sharp objects.”

No one did.

“I know you may think I’m being brash, but we cannot beat around the bush here. I am just telling the truth: you tried to kill yourself, and you failed, and now you’re here because you deserve help.”

Awesome.

Not only was I bad at being a student, and bad at being a person in general (the depression and anxiety had killed my appetite and caused me to stress vomit), but I was also bad at being suicidal.

He might as well have wrapped us all in bubble wrap and shoved helmets on our heads, pushing us out into the “real world” yelling “Don’t forget to take your medication! Talk to each other, it will help you!”

Asshole.

He talked about some bullshit like “If you stopped taking your medication, you should talk to your doctor and get back on it,” stuff like that. Stuff that would make you go “No shit, Sherlock!”

Then he asked us to get in groups of two or three and “talk about our experiences, so we might not feel so alone.”

I stayed where I was, and so did everyone else.

I don’t know who the fuck the teacher was, or why the community center or whoever the fuck hired him did, but he sure as hell didn’t know anything about suicidal people.

Getting us to talk is like asking a tree to recite you the first thousand digits of pi.

Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. But I do know that when I wanted to kill myself, I sure as fuck didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. I wasn’t enthused at the idea of sitting next to another kid like me and hear them awkwardly mumble about how they tried to hang themselves with a belt before it snapped and they fell on the floor and fuck it hurt, and have me awkwardly mumble back at them.

The teacher seemed annoyed, and paired us up with the kids sitting across from us. I got the girl with the bun.

We sat at a table and she, very quietly, told me her name was Noelle.

“Theo,” I said, sticking my hand out.

She shook it, looking nervous. Her palms were sweaty.

She seemed to notice and got embarrassed, muttering “Sorry, I have really bad anxiety...”

I smiled softly to make her feel better.

“It’s fine.”

“You know, I...”

She stopped and wrung her hands, looking at the ceiling.

“I once read a book and this guy was talking to Death, right? And the guy asks Death what makes life worth it, and after a while death said ‘Cats. Cats are nice.’ I thought that, maybe, since Death likes cats and I like cats too, that maybe Death would be nice.”

She shrugged.

Things didn’t seem so bad after that.