The Summer Camp Diaries

• Braden •

WARNING: TRIGGERING CONTENT

There was something wrong with my brain, something truly messed up and screwy. If my life had been anymore ticks I would have had all the building blocks to become a serial killer, a real one. Not just all the jests I knock around to make myself seem like something bigger than I really am.

But underneath all that, there was nothing that could change the fact that I was really just a depressed teenager who had lost the will to live. Maybe I was being petty and stupid and selfish, but it's too late to change that now.

I couldn't really tell if I felt the pain anymore, not really. Since August of last year, my shoulders had become an interlocking mesh of scabs and scar tissue. Any wound that would have healed had since been reopened, then reopened again in a flame of fury. This time I didn't send any texts, although there was one hidden in my drafts waiting to be sent.

I tucked a folded piece of paper under Tirrel's pillow with directions on who to call when my body was found. My phone's password was in there and a few sprawled words that I couldn't remember off the top of my head.

It didn't matter why anymore.

I strode out of the cabin in determination, and gave it one last look, because I wouldn't be coming back. My legs moved slowly as I walked over to the arts and crafts area. Cashton was at a table showing a kid how to make a lanyard. He glanced up and smiled at me, but I could do was nod my acknowledgement. There was a station in the back of the room for making survival bracelets, with entire spools of that all-purpose rope that could hold about four hundred pounds.

No one was manning the station when I got there, but I was still careful to keep out of the counselors' watchful eyes. People tended to start asking questions when one hoarded large amounts of heavy duty rope. I knew these questions all too well and they weren't something I could afford to answer, not now. Not ever.

I smiled smugly as I wound the rope around my forearm. At least after today, I wouldn't have to struggle with those questions anymore. It made my head spin to realize how long I've been planning this; there would be seasons, of course, where I wouldn't think about it, where I would be alright for a night, or two nights, or three if I was lucky, but it would always come back. Sometimes it was a welcome change, sometimes it wasn't. I that I spent so much of my time being a depressed freak of nature, that I didn't know what else to be.

It's like a fish that can breathe air every once in a while, but even though it doesn't hurt them, the air still makes them feel very wrong -- so much so that they might prefer to drown in the water than survive on land.

I wanted to say goodbye to someone, make it feel final, like I was getting a sense of leaving, but as I stepped out of the arts and craft area, I realized that that wouldn't be possible. Now more than ever, surrounded by a couple hundred campers, I was alone. My fingers curled inward on themselves and I could feel my nails digging in my skin. This was a planet of seven billion people, I sincerely doubted I would be missed.

They would cry for a little while, they would take on my pain like a solar energy in a food chain, but eventually my name would be forgotten, then my act, a hundred-other people piled atop of me in the national archive of mental illness statistics. History couldn't even remember all the names of the people who died for noble causes: those who fought in wars and advocated for righteousness.

Because there was too many of them, and if history couldn't remember those who deserved to be remembered, then it sure as hell wouldn't remember me.