Just a Life (by Eli Jenkins)

TRIGGER WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS MENTIONS OF SUICIDE

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My eyes trail the ceiling going over every crevice and bump, a river over rocks and stones. The moonlight filters through the window over my limp body. I want to move, I want to escape this moment, but I don’t. I want to get up and wash the sweat of my face, and my body, and my thoughts. But I can’t. I can only lie here, and analyze the sky that is crushing me, the confinement that is my home. I see valleys, and mountains, and flowers, and skeletons, but then I blink a tear away. and it’s only a ceiling.

This is my life. It could be a journey, or an adventure, or a lesson, or a legacy, but sometimes I blink. And its meaningless. It isn’t any of those things. Its just a life, that I'm living, whether I want to or not. I’m just another living, breathing thing inhabiting the earth until the sun expires and wipes us out. another breathing thing. Breathing thing. Breathing. Am I breathing?

I divert my eyes from the ceiling and refocus on my chest, it rises and falls just slightly as it is filled and then emptied. I guess it doesn't take very much oxygen to be paralyzed. It doesn't exasperate my body at all to wish I didn’t exist. I would’ve thought that my body would panic, that I wanted to end it, to stop it. But it’s calm, I’m calm. It, or more so I, have resigned to fate.

There’re pills in the medicine cabinet. This is the only thought thus far that has inspired my body to move. I sit up, and somehow I’ve already decided that that's what I have to do. That's the best option, more so the only option. My hands are clumsy as I fumble to open bottle after bottle and poor a calculated amount in my sweaty palm. I can feel my pulse in my ears. Its all I can hear. This is what I have to do. This is what I'm going to do. I feed myself confidence to override the calm panic rising in me as I fill a glass with water. I'm In sweatpants. I really didn’t think Id die wearing sweatpants. In an instant I brush away any second thoughts and I dump the cocktail of pills in my mouth. I feel them on my tongue, the metallic poison coats the roof of my mouth. I have to swallow them. I'm going to swallow them. I press the cup of luke-warm water to my lip. I’ve always hated drinking water. Why drink water when there’s sweet tea, or Kool-Aid, or root beer.

“You have to drink water” why? “Because I told you so”. I hear my moms voice chanting in my head as she’s always told me. “If he doesn't have to drink water than I don’t have to either” I remember my little brother cutting in. He always acted just like me, so much that I don’t know who he’d be if he didn’t have me. Guilt wrenched my stomach, and in a fit of tear-stained glee, I spit any chances of relief in the sink. What once was a cocktail of colors and milligrams, has been reduced to a muddy splatter of wasted potential on my porcelain sink.

I really need to go see him. I bet he misses me. I think of him running to greet me in the driveway as I doze off to sleep.

#EliJenkins #Sad #pills #numb #feelingworthless #TimeBomb