I ran up the stairs, shaking with my anger, not letting the tears fall from my eyes. When I got to my room, I slammed the door with enough force to shake the whole house. Even behind the tightly closed door with my music turned all the way up, I could not block out the sound of the yelling downstairs. My parents were fighting again, about me as usual.

I hated knowing that I was the cause of most of the fights that went on in my horrible family. Even when it hadn't been my fault, my father always managed to blame it on me anyways. I was the family scapegoat. What were they going to blame on me next, the weather? I was ruining this family, my mother had said so herself.

And there was the intolerable abuse. Ever since I was about three and my younger brother was born, my parents had both been beating the shit out of me on a regular basis. I never said anything about to anyone, though I had threatened to call child services on my mother multiple times. I wanted to leave this house, I didn't care where I went as long as I was safe from them.

But I was strong, and I took a lot of shit from them over the years. It was a good thing that I didn't bruise easily or someone would have noticed something. More than anything, being beaten by my parents was more of a blow to my dignity than anything. It became the only thing that could ever jerk the tears out of my eyes.

So I was depressed. A lot of teenagers are these days. But the lucky ones get pulled out of their hole of unhappiness before it is too late. I didn't. I was one of those that was so suicidal that it was a miracle that I was still alive. Every night I thought that it could all end right there, just me and my steel blade that I kept stashed away in my room. And then in the morning I would wake up and tell myself that I could just slit my throat before I had to face another terrible day at school. Each day, I would doubt that I was actually going to survive. And then I did anyways, just to find myself more miserable than I had been that morning.

Self-injury was my only relief. It was the only way out I had. The blade became my best friend, one of the only friends I had left when they all started to find out what I really was. Most of my female friends were good girls, those people that always did their homework, never drank or smoked, or did anything they weren't supposed to.

By that time, when I was 15, I had been cutting for over a year. My friends had finally started to notice the vicious slashes that ran up and down my left forearm most of the time. When one of my best friends found out, she told a lot of other people, even though she had promised me that she wouldn't. I had been stupid to trust anyone. I learned in my later years not to. Eventually, my friends became more and more distant from me. They were all convinced that self-injury was contagious and they didn't want to end up as an insane suicidal, bi-polar person like me. Why would anyone want to be like that? So I basically became more of a loner than I already was.

I stood up from my bed and searched around my room for one of the various things I had hid around the room to cut with. I hid them from myself so I wouldn't be tempted to cut. Part of me wanted to stop what I was doing to myself. But I couldn't. It was too late and I was already addicted to my own bleeding.

Finally, I found what I was looking for, a broken piece of glass I hid in my bookcase. It didn't matter what it was, as long as it was sharp. I pushed up the long black sleeve of my shirt and hacked away. It took a while to produce any blood, but the pain I was causing myself felt so good. It was like a pleasant tickle rather than the acute sting of a sharp object penetrating my skin.

But then my relief came crashing down around me. I had turned the music up almost as loud as it could go as my parents had raised their voices even more. So I didn't hear it even as my father stomped up the stairs. He threw the door of my room open.

The muscles in my hand that tightly gripped my cure slackened and the piece of glass fell from my hand. I had just been caught cutting. My parents already knew about my self-injury, but they never did anything about it. They thought that just by telling me to stop, I would. That had been months ago, and if anything, my cutting had become more frequent.

Before I could snatch it up again, my father grabbed my arm and twisted it around so he could get a good look at my sliced up arm. He pulled at my skin, producing more blood. But it no longer felt good. He yelled for my mother to come upstairs.

I got an hour long lecture from both of them, which really more yelling and screaming and threatening than anything else. My mom said she was calling a psychiatrist the next day, and if recommended, they would send me to a mental institution.

"Lauren, we love you, and we don't want you to hurt yourself like this," my mother said, false tears in her eyes. I didn't understand why they tried to tell me this. I was no longer the gullible little girl I had once been. They didn't love me. They never had. My parents didn't care about anyone but themselves, and maybe my younger brother. They took away my glass, which wasn't so bad because I had other sharp objects stashed away in my room. They also did something completely unforgivable when I wouldn't tell them why I was doing what I was to myself. I saw it coming, and I struggled to grab my diary before my mother could. But my father sat on me to restrain me, and she got it.

"We have to read it, Lauren. I hope you understand that we have to know what is going on with you," she said.

"Fuck you do! What do you care anyways? I hate you!!" I screamed so loud that the windows of my room shook.

I had put this off far too long. I did not want to be trapped by them, locked away from the rest of the world. Why was I even holding on? I had nothing left to live for, and I wanted to die more than I wanted to be strong and kick everyone in the ass for what they had done to me.

I waited until they went to sleep. I could hardly stand the anticipation of it. Finally, the door to their bedroom across the hallway was closed and all the lights in the house. I smiled with no regret as I took the knife from my underwear drawer. It was finally time.

I didn't bother to write any noted to anyone. They didn't deserve it. Besides, I had nothing to say to anyone. I didn't want to prolong it any further than I already had.

With one quick sweep of the knife, I had opened up the veins of my left wrist. I was gushing blood everywhere, not caring that the stains would forever grace the white carpeting of what had been my room. I didn't know if one wrist would be enough. It wouldn't kill me fast enough, so taking the knife in my unstable, less skilled left hand, I slashed open my other wrist.

I laughed as I felt myself slipping away. I had never bled so much at once in my whole life, and it felt amazingly good. This blood, my life, was all leaving me.

I had one last thing to do before I was completely gone. Taking the blood that spilled freely from both wrists, I pressed my fingers into it, on the white walls of my room, I wrote one last cryptic message. FAREWELL, SEE YOU IN HELL.

Okay, so I didn't believe in a heaven or a hell, but that didn't matter. I figured that if there was truly a hell, I was going. That thought didn't bother me because I knew that hell could not possibly be worse than my life. I just wanted to write it my own blood so badly, a lasting memory of my presence in this world.

I laid down on the bed one last time, feeling no regret about anything I had ever done. This was what I wanted, and I was finally going to know what total and complete nothingness felt like. I folded my arms across my chest, like the corpse that I was becoming.

It was not long before I slipped out of my consciousness of the world and all that it contained. Shortly afterwards, my breathing and heart stopped.

I thought that it was the end, my long-awaited end. But little did I know that my life was only the very tortured beginning of my doomed existence.