Is Anyone Out There?

Chapter 10

I am a bit confused. Why would Jake self harm?He has everything that I don't, a perfect family, friends, good looks. What caused him to get so low as to cut himself? "Jake?" I say after a minute of complete and utter silence goes by. It's not the awkward kind though, it's just a chance for us to regain our thoughts.

He looks at me and nods, urging me to continue. "Why did you self harm? What made you do it?" I ask. I know that it's a really personal question and I wouldn't want to answer it myself so I add, "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to..." 

We are sitting across from each other, Indian style, so we are looking straight at each other. I can tell that he feels exactly like I do, vulnerable. "No, it's alright," he says. "It started in 7th grade. I started developing my style, a different one from all the guys in my grade. Just because my hair was longer and I work darker clothes like band t-shirts and skinny jeans. I was branded as "emo". " I can hear the pain in his voice slowly coming out. "People stopped talking to me as a friend and started bullying me. I didn't understand why all my friends ignored me and were embarrassed to talk to me," 

"Then the notes came. People would shove these little handwritten notes into my locker that said some pretty fucking horrible things like 'why don't you just complete the image and cut yourself, emo', 'go kill yourself, noone's going to miss you', and 'why do you even try? You're worthless." his eyes are closed, masking the hurt that I know is there. "All of their words got to me and I started believing them myself,"

"The summer before 8th grade, I cut myself. I was getting phonecalls and texts from these people and it was all too much. When I realized what I had done, I swore to myself that I wouldn't ever do it again, and I didn't for almost four months. In that time, my anxiety that I had seemed to get better and so did my depression. Then I got my first girlfriend," 

"I thought that I was in love with her, but for the time that I was with her, I was just pushing all my fears, insecurities, and pain back so that they were hidden. That 'love' I felt was actually a dependence that was unhealthy. I realized this when I found her with one of the guys that hurt me so much... she was cheating on me," I want to grab Jake and hug him and never let him go. I want to tell him that everything is going to be alright, but I don't. I'm too scared that he's going to push me away. 

He continues on after taking a deep breath, his voice wavering with every word. "The floodgates opened and all of the feelings that I had been cooping up, keeping hidden, poured out of me. "I couldn't control my emotions and did the first thing that came to mind. Razors, blood, pain, cut. What I was on the inside would now match the outside. I cut and sobbed for what felt like hours and my depression and anxiety came back worse than ever. 

"Every night I would lock myself in my room of the bathroom. I felt so alone, so broken. I cut so deep that  I knew I would need stitches, but I didn't tell my parents. I thought no one cared about me, so I tried to take care of it on my own. I thought that it was done bleeding, closed up enough and I had bandaged it and believed that it was okay. It opened up at dinner though, and that's how my parents found out. They rushed me to the hospital and I got 6 stitches. I was put on anti-depressants. The news got around at school and things got worse," he opens his eyes and looks straight at me. Tears are welled up in them and he finally shows me the pain, the vulnerability. 

"I took the anti-depressants, which were supposed to do good, and took an overdose. I just wanted to die. For the last time, I thought, I slit both of my wrists... deep. I laid there, on the floor, bleeding, and waiting for all of my suffering to end, to go away. I don't remember anything after I closed my eyes. I know that my mother found me,"

"The doctor said if I had been found out any later, it would've been very difficult, almost impossible, to help me. I would've succeeded, I wouldn't be here right now. I would be dead." that would sort of rings in the air. Dead. I couldn't imagine Jake not being here. I wouldn't have met him and I would probably be at 'home' right now, crying and cutting and being miserable.