Everything goes black

It’s 4 o’clock in the morning, she’s been lying in bed since 10, unable to sleep. Her alarm is set to go off in 1 ½ hours. All she’s done for the past 6 hours is think. She dreads the morning. Dreads the monotonous daily routine that has become her life.

Maybe she’ll skip school today. Have a friend call her in sick. She wonders how she let her life get so bad. She thought she had control of it, of everything. She can’t remember when she stopped being happy, only that it was a long time ago.

She said she had control, that she could stop whenever she wanted to, but the scars were proof that she was wrong. She always told herself, “this is the last cigarette,” or, “one more week and then I’ll get rid of the drugs for good.” She told her friends, “one more beer, one more shot of vodka and then I’ll stop,” but looking around her room you could tell she didn’t have control of things, they had control of her.

She can’t remember how it happened but somehow, over the years, she had gone from smoking one cigarette a day, to becoming a pack-a-day smoker. Syringes and needles were scattered on her desk and dressers, pills were all over the floor, beer bottles filled her trash can. She was only 16 years old, how did this happen?

She remembers times when her skin was flawless, now, there are scars everywhere. She’d long ago stopped hiding the cuts and burns. She didn’t care anymore. She was never really there, she was just a shell of the girl that people used ...

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She dreamed of a normal life. Not a life where she had to take a swig of vodka every morning just to function. She wished she had a life where she was at least a B average student, where she wasn’t the center of her parents’ fights. A life where death wasn’t the main attraction at the 3-ring circus. A normal life.

No 16 year old should feel this way or do these things. No one should base the quality of their day by how much Heroin they pumped into their arm.

The one good thing she had going for her was taken away. Snatched up and stolen. She went numb after he died. Died? He didn’t have the chance to “die”. He was murdered in cold blood by his once friend. She didn’t want to go one after the love of her life was taken so she crawled into the shadows.

She doesn’t feel safe anywhere anymore. She carries a knife on her no matter where she goes. She spends her free time thinking of how life used to be, holding back tears that would pour from her eyes all day if they could.

Some nights, she just lays in bed and cries from 10 p.m. to 5:30 a.m., then she takes a shower, does her make-up, and hides behind smiles and laughter. Most days she fears that she’s become a zombie. Her routine has been drilled into her so much that she feels almost robot-like.

“Today will be different,” she tells herself every morning when the alarm goes off. “Today, I’ll start life over. Be a new person.” It never works though. But it’s not the same on this morning. Instead of waiting for the alarm to go off, she sits up in bed and picks up the phone.

She doesn’t even have to look at the numbers as she dials his cell phone. His message comes on. She’s halfway disappointed, but then again, who answers their phone a 4:30 in the morning anyway? She leaves a message telling him to call her in sick, not expecting a reply, she hangs up. She puts the phone back on the charger, and turns off the alarm.

She reaches under the bed and pulls out the white box that has been sitting under there, untouched, for 6 months. She opens it and takes out the loaded .8mm that rests inside. She cocks it and puts the barrel in her mouth. A single tear falls from her eye as she silently tells the world good-bye.

Everything goes black.