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I had decided a day. I was ready. I couldn't bear breathing anymore. I wanted it all to end. I couldn't.

The feel of smooth metal on my wrist was cold, almost sterile. It felt like I was finally able to breathe after spending so long gurgling salt water in my lungs. And then no more. No more.

Without any goodbyes, without any notice. I was gonna finally die.

Suddenly my phone chimed with a notification. Jack just uploaded a new video.

I looked at it. Twisted my lips.

Jack has been helping me a lot since I found him. Would it be rude to do this while the last notification I had on my phone was his video? I should be courteous, shouldn't I? 

Would it make me a coward to have one last good thing to see before everything goes away?

What does it matter. I will return to my end shortly after anyway.

The artstyle caught my heart, despite my insistence to stop it from beating another beat. The longer I watched it, the more I felt called out. As if he was there, telling me all the things I should've already known but never believed. At the end of it, I shivered through waves of panic attacks, one after another. I want to die. I want to. I've decided. I have to. I'm tired of everybody leaving. It's my turn to leave. Nobody ever stays. They lie. They lie, and keep lying. I never want to believe anybody anymore. I want to stop hurting. I want to stop. You can't sit there and tell me I was wrong. 

I prepare myself for 4 months. I can't bear to live another day.

And yet he sits there. An electric voice coming out of the speakers in my earphone. I read his lips, even from the screen. Why this game? Why you? Why now?

I'd trembled, blade so close to my pulse. So, so close. 

A flash of imagery went through my head. Sis will find my body in the bathroom. Three clean slit across the wrist. Blood pooling on the floor. In her house. It'll take weeks to clean the bloodstain. She'll take weeks to desentisize the room. Widget. Who will babysit Widget?

What will it do to sis, finding my corpse like that?

I threw the blade away. Angry. Pissed. I spent 4 months familiarizing myself, my mind, with my decision. And still I couldn't do it. Couldn't do it to her. Couldn't do it to Widget. I tasted snot and tears and blood in my mouth. I'd bitten my tongue. I laid there, crumpled, for hours.

Eventually, the sobs ran out. The hiccups remained. 

I washed my face. Cleared out the evidences.

I took my phone, and put the video on repeat.

I know Jack hears every day how he saves lives. This one is no exception.

_____________________________________________________________________________

  26th June 2019

Soon it will be 2020 in just a couple of months. It spells a lot of things in the politics party, considering it’s the target year of various democracy manifestos finally coming to fruition (or not). It will be the year which I will not celebrate. 

Because I intent to be dead by the end of this year.

On a particularly crippling and devastating night, the weight of my depression came too much to bear. Under the blanket, my breath unsteady, my chest caving on the inside, my head exploding. I wished nothing more to be taken apart, flayed alive on a burning coal so that the all-encompassing pain will push it all away. Nobody was by my side. Nobody could help. 

I screamed for it. And yet it was futile.

Even as they tried, it was futile.

And I decided, that being dead is better than having to repeat this hellhole for God knows how long. I just wish everything would come to end.

As I decided, so does everything I cherish. I lost Mya. I will soon lose Indah. I keep drowning in the memories of my previous lover. Incapable to forget, I could only bear to bury them with me.

There aren’t a lot of things I can feel these days. Everything is numb and muted, as if they’re filtered through sensation-deprived walls, and as temporary as they are, they vanish within seconds before any miniscule records can be made. Logic spears the cradle these days and on the days it’s not, depression takes heel. Somehow the two coexists in the chamber.

A part of me wishes to see the future. Yet that part has been ignored and ridiculed and beaten and stomped until there is barely a wisp of it left. There is no desire in me to see anything further than the day I end. Not anymore. Truthfully, I hate when my inner voice becomes melancholy and almost mopey. It’s annoying. It makes it look like I’m some pathetic protagonist who couldn’t “do anything to save the one they love” when all I am is a faceless character in the background used for fodder. I’ve never minded being the faceless fodder, don’t get me wrong, and I’ve never wanted to be in the spotlight for the “protagonist” because I do not possess the lawful/chaotic good personality it requires, but the bemoaning of my incapable, feeble mind hits too close a flaw for the profile. 

I resent it.

I take solace in my inevitable end. Whatever happens, it will soon come to an end. I used to have a driving force that kept me putting one foot in front of the other. It used to be my education, then my sister, then Mya and Indah, and then myself. But none of those things stayed, and slowly, my driving force sputtered into a dying stop and collapsed. Bringing myself down was the easiest of it all. 

Apathy is my greatest fear, and my closest weakness. 

The more afraid I am, the more numb I feel. 

And when the day ends, it greets me like the feel of cold metal on my skin.