Sliced Trees and Dead Words

45 - My only friend, the End.

- DALEN -

So, you'll notice a few pages missing between the end of the last chapter and the beginning of this one. No, there aren't any more last words I've hidden for you to find. Those lost pages only contained my first few failed attempts at goodbye, and were burned along with the branches, leaves and logs ironically keeping us warm at night, Wolfey.

As it turns out, finding the right words to succinctly say goodbye to my two best friends isn't all that easy. You'd have thought with the amount of times I've already tried to do this, that I'd have mastered it by now. I think the official count is at six, most of them attempts by overdosing because, despite knowing I'm not meant to exist in this world, I'm a coward and have never been able to just pull the trigger so to speak, and find a failsafe way to end my life so I know for certain I won't wake up from it again.

Overdosing again was questionable considering both the tolerance I'd built up and repeated fails I'd had previously. And even with all the sharp objects I've willingly jabbed into my skin in the past, cutting through flesh with anything other than a 28G1/2 needle involves a lot more blood than my gag reflex can handle, so nipping an artery with a blade wasn't going to work either. People have survived from a gun to the head, and the cracking sound of the shot would have terrified poor Medusa and I would have likely died worrying about her finding me with brain matter leaking out of my head. Jumping in front of a truck on the outback highway or stepping in front of a train seemed the most selfish, as it would mess with those poor bastards' psyches thinking they were at fault for killing some bloke, and having to see it on replay in their minds whenever they closed their eyes just wasn't fair. There was a technical difficulty with electrocution when you lived out of a car, though I did once consider fiddling with the battery to get the job done, but I then thought of the rancid smell of burning flesh and didn't want anyone to have to suffer through that. I tried to weaken my body to the point of heart failure by not eating, but old mate Wolfey learned soon enough what I was doing and always made sure I was eating. I tried to pick fights with people when I was drunk, hoping I'd somehow fall and crack my skull on concrete or something in the process, but my issue with that one was much the same as it was the truck/train scenario—I don't want some random person racked with guilt for the rest of time for unintentionally helping me kill myself. Jumping off a building or cliff was associated with the gun-brain matter mess, which no unwilling person should have to see, and I'm really not that much of an asshole. The human body naturally fights against drowning. Choking on my own vomit via poisoning or excessive alcohol consumption seemed a rather smelly and unrefined way to go, not that I was ever all that clean or polished a human in life anyway.

And so we arrive at death via hanging—the most clean and I assume quick and relatively painless method that also involves the least effort on my part. Find a rope, find a tree, loop, knot and drop. Sure, there's a little more to it than that. The rope needs to be good quality so it won't fray or snap before the job is done, and the knot forming the noose needs to make sure it holds firm and doesn't slip open and let me fall out only half-dead. The tree needs to be strong and sturdy enough to maintain my weight as my body likely thrashed around at the end of the rope, trying to fight my decision to kill myself.

At the time of my writing this, I haven't found that perfect combination of rope, knot and tree, but I know I will soon.

And when I do, please tell my parents I loved them, and try your best to forgive them like I have—I mean it, Luney. They tried their best with the resources they had, which were already limited enough to begin with, and I can't expect any more than that. This isn't their fault.

But you can use my evil bastard of a grandfather a little if you need to blame someone. It won't mean anything to him to know you blame him, but if it helps you feel better to place blame somewhere, he's someone I wouldn't feel guilty for encouraging you to hate. I despise him too, and can finally say I'm not sorry I can't forgive him for what he did to me. He doesn't deserve it, and he never will. That kind of evil is unfathomable, or at least it should be; and I can't sit here and write that what he did to me didn't begin the slow process of my own demise and eventual death. Many other things happened along the way, but he was arguably the catalyst for the initial decline. When I was five years old . . .