Deck
I wrote this in the school auditorium. There were some kids being loud and obnoxious, and I was angry at myself that I couldn’t be a part of that sort of fun. At the time my disdain was mostly directed towards them. “Look at them, wasting their time acting like idiots,” I’d grumble in my head. But I also knew that the real reason I reacted the way I did was because of something which I lacked within myself. I was jealous that I couldn’t talk and express myself freely like they could, and I hated not being able to step up and take responsibility for my own happiness. When I noticed them, I observed all the emotions I was feeling and tried to describe them with words.
Before this, I had struggled with some thoughts of killing myself for a while, but decided suicide was too cliché and in the long run, wouldn’t help in getting Nell to like me.
January 24, 2008
I’m not motivated very much. I’m not motivated to do anything at all. My priority right now is to keep myself alive. Doing homework really doesn’t seem like it will make me feel any better.
How do those terrorists feel when they blow themselves up? I imagine it would hurt, but it would only last less than a fraction of a second. I’m too much of a peace-lover.
What would my grandmother say if she was here with me? Smile. Keep your chin up. Look forward, shoulders back. It’s pretty hard to do actually.
And why smile when you’re not happy? Smiling isn’t going to get rid of the loneliness.
Loneliness. Jealousy. Envy. Anger. Fucking kids… Low self-esteem. Inferiority. Superiority. Social ineptitude.
I want to fall asleep at a graveyard. I feel dead. Dead and sick. Somebody please nurse me back to health. Nell? Maybe I need a mother.
My grandmother, the main female figure who raised me as a child, died when I was in 6th grade, about a week before the 9/11 bombings in 2001. She was strong and tough, keeping the family in line. She took care of me when my mother and father were working, which was most of the time. I never had a close relationship with either of them, our time spent together being mostly neutral or negative.
At the time of this entry, I wasn’t talking to my mother out of petty spite. A year earlier, we were all having dinner at the table. My mother and I started to argue about something that I’ve since forgotten. I couldn’t put into words the frustration that I felt, and on an impulse, I ran out the back door and jumped off the back deck of the house where there was a steep slope… about a 10 foot drop. Not really enough to kill me, but pretty painful nonetheless. I wanted my pain to be heard – all of the emotional pain I was going through and the immediate physical pain I experienced lying on the damp grass that night. Agonizing minutes passed as I squirmed around screaming. When no one came I crawled like a worm through the grass, up the wooden stairs, and finally through the kitchen door where my father was washing dishes with no signs that anything out of the ordinary had happened.
The pain was searing enough to make me want to live. Crying, still on the floor, I made my way over to the house phone to dial 911 for an ambulance. My mother came down the stairs and snatched it away. She said I was fine. At that moment my body was saying otherwise. My lower spine in particular had a bit of a fracture.
My dad eventually drove me to the hospital after I miserably writhed around in bed for a few hours.
In the end, I blamed her for that night and didn’t speak to her for nearly two years.