I’ll never forget the day I decided to kill myself. It started normally enough, me waking up to a lack of plans for the near and distant future, stepping into a cold shower where my standard early-morning tears wouldn’t stand out, and willfully attempting to metaphorically wash the bad thoughts of hopelessness away.
This routine had made itself mine about three months earlier, after I failed my fourth class and lost sight of my dreams in design and humanitarianism. What kept the thoughts from persisting for the entirety of my waking hours was my brother. In the face of my failure, he was a sucker punch of success. It wasn’t that he gave me hope, just that my failure wasn’t so terrible. That as long as he succeeded, it wouldn’t matter what happened to me.
In hindsight, that seems like the opposite view from me one would expect. Being a failure in the glow of such brilliance would more than likely breed feelings of jealousy and spite. But nay, it was to be undying admiration and love.
The worst part was really my parents. They tried to be the good parents with deprivations and groundings, but after a few semesters of high school it was clear that these cliché machinations would not achieve the desired result. They were forced to give up and turn their attention to the much worthier investment that was my brother Rob.
In kindergarten, like all five year olds, I was asked to announce who my hero was. It had always been my brother, even though he was just a year older. I was unimpressed with my father’s ability to perform a desk job or my mom’s to teach dance. But my brother could tell jokes and stories and add 15 and 13, and therefore he was magic. This feeling lasted stoically for the remainder of his life.
It was in the shower that the day ceased to be routine. It was the shower that reminded me that Rob was thrown into a garbage compactor last night during one of his few and far between evenings of flamboyantly bad judgment. The police had come to our door at 10:15 pm and I vaguely recalled my knees buckling and a generous stream of vomit directed at Officer Grady’s shoes. Now the vomit returned, but my knees miraculously held.
After making sure that the bile was drained from the tub, I stumbled out onto the floor and cried into a towel. A while later I was surprised to find myself fully clothed and standing in the entrance of the kitchen. My parents were staring at their omelettes wordlessly. A few moments passed and my mother looked up. I get the impression that what she said conveyed that I was to attend school that day. Entirely too derailed to argue, my mind accepted these words and set to work propelling me out the door without my bag.
School drifted by without any help along. No one said anything, so I guess the news managed not to be received by the Post. Thus, my school day passed without a word. The enthralling silence of autopilot was the sum of my lessons. As I left school, infrequent iotas of consciousness attempted to seep through, probably in the hopes of keeping me from being flattened while crossing streets to get back home. Rob flashed through and my throat made a sorry pot shot at a nearby bush. It must have been low on ammunition since my autopilot didn’t come with the eating feature. It was this moment my mind switched back on and I looked ahead at eye level for the first time that day.
“Fuck this,” said I. Meaning life. Suddenly, avoiding cars didn’t seem the thing to do. I turned back to the road. Between me and the road was the first human to gain my notice since the kitchen.
“I’m Sunday. You look like crap.”
I stopped dead for an interminable instant. I wasn’t prepared for the first human interaction of the day, as it was brought to my attention that I practically dreamed going to school. The speed bump charades could wait a moment. I decided that Sunday deserved a response. She had been walking to school along the same route as I for a month or so, but we hadn’t yet spoken or even acknowledged each other’s existence. I was able to conclude that I must indeed look like crap.
I couldn't spot anything technically inaccurate. I love the impact of the opening line and the voice of the main character as well - I could really empathise with him and his kind of detachment, it made the idea of him wanting to kill himself believable without being cliched. I'm already drawn to Sunday too. I hope there's more to come!
