You Will Survive.

Suicide

A single word surfaces in my mind as I step off of the bus and into the dizzyingly bright sunshine. It’s so clear that at first I think someone has spoken it directly into my ear. Shaking my head and beginning my trek, I turn the word over and over, growing increasingly anxious.

Kyle.

I seek the cause of the sudden intrusion of the name, but find nothing. Nothing except painful thoughts I’d tried the entirety of the day to suppress. So, thoroughly unnerved by the sudden turn from a good day to a bad one, I make my way home, where the telephone, and my girlfriend, awaits. 

I know from the moment I turn the key in the lock and felt the wash of artificial cold air that things are far from the worst they can be. I shudder, but it isn’t the chill of the air the causes the goose bumps. Or the deflated feeling developing in my stomach. 

I let my bag fall to the floor and pick up the telephone, feeling it cold and dead in my hand. Peculiar, I know, that a phone can seem dead, but this one does. To the extent that I’m reluctant to even use it. I cradle it and drop heavily onto the couch, thinking again of someone I’d never even met.

She met him after being admitted to River Valley Behavioral Institute. Their relationship began shortly after ours did and just as innocently. Or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking. I know only what I was told, and the truth has a way of being censored when being delivered to loved ones.

Once she was out of Valley, Marie (the she in question) maintained contact with Kyle. I was her boyfriend, but you couldn’t tell it. She now lived, after her mother sprung the random migration on her, thirty miles away from me in Daviess County. Our conversation was limited, a phone call every other day at the most, and our relationship was floundering. I didn’t know this at the time, however. I was much too self-centered to notice much of anything. 

I began to become concerned when I was put on the back burner for this “Kyle”. This “Kyle” who was a friend from River Valley that needed someone to talk to. This “Kyle” who spoke to my girlfriend more than I did. Of course, this anger and spite would dissolve soon enough into emotions not as easily handled.

“He won’t get a chance to talk on the phone for a long time,” Marie had said to me over the phone, “because he’s moving to his dad’s house, and there’s no phone over there.” I’d waited all day to get a chance to talk to her, and I was being blown off. 

“Alright, Marie,” I said, resigned. “Call me as soon as you’re done, okay?” 

She agreed, but I didn’t hear from her again for another three hours, and even then it was I who called her.

“I’m sorry, Josh, it’s just, he’s really sad about stuff and I want to make sure that he’s okay.”

“Fine.” 

And that was it. I let her have her Kyle time and made a promise to myself (and partly to her) that I wasn’t going to be a second rate boyfriend anymore. I was tired of being second, period.

I pick up the dead phone again and gingerly dial the number. It rings a dozen times or so before there is an answer.

“Hello?” It’s Marie, her voice and choked wavering. A wave of panic envelopes me and me body becomes cold.

“Marie? Are you okay?” I say, not really wanting an answer but getting one all the same. 

“No…” 

I squeeze my eyes closed and take a deep breath.

 “What’s wrong?” I don’t know what I should expect. Or maybe I’d been expecting something like this all day.

“Kyle’s dead.”

The effect is that of a train wreck: sudden, disastrous and life altering. I clutch the phone in my hand and feel my pulse pounding in my ears. He’s not really dead, a sneering voice in the back of my mind whispers. She’s lying, feeling sorry for herself. Lying to you, using you…

I shake off these irrational thoughts, bewildered at my own cynicism. My mind churns with the implications of what has happened.

“What? Why?” An obvious response given the circumstances, and the only one I can manage.

“He overdosed on his antidepressants. It’s my fault.”

“Your fault…?”

I’m suddenly brought back to the night before, to a conversation between Marie and myself. I’d called her without any real hope of getting to speak to her. I assumed Kyle was on the other line. But I was surprised, She informed me that she was, in fact, speaking to him, but that she’d let him know that she couldn’t talk. She clicked over for a few moments and when she returned, I was told she’d been trying to keep him awake. “Because,” she’d said, “if he goes to sleep he’ll probably die.”

Of course, I asked why.

“He took his entire bottle of Welbutrin, and he said that if he fell asleep he would die.” Her tone perked up the smallest bit. “But I think he should be okay. He told me that he threw a lot of them back up.”

“So why did he do it in the first place?” I asked. There was an edge to my voice that I would later recognize as disappointment. Some part of me hoped that he would die.

“That poem I wrote about you in my online journal, the one that talked about you. He said that he read it then took the pills.” 

I knew that poem all right, the one that told about how happy I made her; the poem that was a final sign to Kyle that she wasn’t going to break up with me for him. Serves him right for trying to steal my girlfriend flashed briefly in my head. 

After I got off of the phone I didn’t think anymore about it. After all, people around you didn’t die. And they especially don’t kill themselves. That only happened on the news, or you heard it from a friend at school. 

It just didn’t happen.

I’m brought back to the here and now by Marie’s quiet but insistent sobbing. I’m unsure of what to say to make it stop…so I say nothing.

“I’m going to go,” she says. I’m barely able to hear her. 

“Why?” I’m breathing heavily now, and I can feel my body losing sensation. The room fades in and out of focus, and I notice, very apathetically, that I’m falling. I land hard but feel nothing.

“I have things I need to do. I’ll talk to you later.” Without waiting for a reply, she hangs up, leaving me with nothing but the dead noise coming from the telephone. I sigh and drop it to the floor.

It took months to convince Marie that Kyle’s death wasn’t her fault. Months full of nights full of tears. It was as if my entire world had turned night, every day a struggle to see the brighter side of things. I was constantly at odds with Marie, and constantly hurt by her refusal to see the truth. Eventually, I got through to her, and she began to see it they way I did, the way everyone else did. Kyle became a shadow and gradually faded out of our lives. The dark cloud that followed us around began to dissipate. 

I learned to keep Marie close, and to make sure she knew that I wanted her there. Pretty soon, the subject dropped from our minds altogether. She began to live her life unburdened by so much debilitating guilt, and the sun comes out these days because of it.