Note to Readers: Although this story may appear to be very insensitive, it is not intended to mock or label anyone, especially those who may have severe emotional problems.

I sit shrouded in the dusky abyss I’m supposed to call my room, gazing despondently through the haze of my never-ending depression and my wispy, jet-black hair. Why does no one care about me? Don’t they see my shameful existence crumbling down to a painful, smoldering rubble of pain as I walk along my endless road of despair? The smooth metal blade of my razor, my only friend, entices me as it flicks silver light into my eyes. My icy fingers lift it, and I close my eyes and shut out the cruel, merciless world as I allow the sharp tool to caress my worthless veins.

My eyes open long enough to spot the long, thin river of scarlet snake down my scarred wrist and stain the blinding, snowwhite carpet. The liquid agony makes a pool at my knees, and the screws of humiliation holding my detestable innards in place are loosened temporarily. Crystalline diamond beads fall from my dull eyes and play sick games on my raw cheeks. I feel ugly… and little… and weak. My own parents are blind to this sobbing lump in the corners of their home, their own son, their Devon. I hope death, a sneaky creature, will discover me and ease me of the burden of living.

Shifting around, writhing with the guilt that’s weighing heavily upon my shoulders, my numb and blood-stained fingers grope for my CD player. Hawthorne Heights filters out of the dust-glazed speakers; the harsh notes attempting to calm my pounding and ravaged heart. Both beats form a rhythm together. I wish the beat inside of me would cease.

My flowing hair used to be a soft flaxen color, but I was so sickened… it was a poisonous color to my eyes... eyes that refuse to be satisfied… in one impulsive moment I had painstakingly changed the hue to one of the ultimate midnight black. But the artificial darkness doesn’t alleviate the disgust I experience at my hideous features. I look like a monster… no wonder no one loves me. Even mouthfuls of Tylenol do not ease the pain; instead they create a lump behind the one of sadness that already lives in my throat.
Life holds me down, stuck as a prisoner within my own disturbed mind. If death shall come in my direction, it will carry redemption. The door will unlock and I will fly from the desperation like a hopeful dove.

Mother yells, and her voice reaches for me from underneath my tightly closed door. “DE-VON! IT’S TIME FOR DINNER!” The melody of her calling causes my stomach to turn. It sounds like the cries of a dying animal. She claims that she made chicken… something which may tempt me to savor food again.
As I take my seat at the table, which is as flat as my expression, I notice how my parents are looking at me, Mother’s emerald eyes are filled with a strong loathing for the pitiful life before her. Father’s eyes reflect his disgust for me. I know I am a poor excuse for a son. He treats my homosexual brother with more love and compassion than he does with me. He never wanted me.

Mother sets the food in front of me, and says in a bored manner, “Sorry. I kind of burned it.” She doesn’t sound apologetic in the least. Behind this ‘mistake’, I see revenge; Mother wants revenge for my birth. She has now taken a part in God’s conspiracy against any happiness I could have relished. My eyes well with hot tears, for the symbol of my inner destruction sits quite visibly upon the china. The meat is as charred and blackened as my own soul. I excuse myself from the table.

I open the front door and step out into the stale sunlight of the late winter evening. My skin, grotesquely striped from my therapy sessions with the razor, glows a sallow milky-white. My jeans cling tightly to my leg, and it’s a battle to reach into my pocket for a cigarette. Another battle I often fight is the battle of arguing with my mom about how tight my pants are. She’s always complaining, and her complaints mask her abhorrence for my pile of bones. The only time she ever demonstrates her caring is when she’s trying to keep my ghastly image from embarrassing her.

Drawing in deep smoke from the ashy roll of paper, tobacco, and nicotine, each trembling nerve of mine falls into a restless sleep. The amber jewels of fire at the end of my comfort stick leer at me, and as time freezes, I bring them to my hand. Each burn allows the embers to bite into my flesh and suck out the poison of my mistakes. Trying not to wince, I relish the cigarette’s painful kisses. Each circular wound stares back at me with red eyes, and my own begin to drip clear, sorrowful water. Why am I so knotted up inside?
As if the moment wasn’t torture enough, along comes my girlfriend, Ivy. She exposes her hateful heart through her glare. It creates a hole upon the little and fragile sheet of hope I have constructed. It is an embarrassment to have a girlfriend named after a plant, and yet she is a vine as her name suggests, because she winds her way around my throat to suffocate me and entangle her control around my miserable existence. “You smell like smoke,” she says in a critical tone. “I can’t deal with you anymore. You’re a crazy, messed-up… manwhore! We’re OVER!”

Each word pierces my heart with a stabbing, white-hot vengeance. What miniscule confidence I had shatters like paper-thin glass, each shard severing any threads of hope that has begun to form within my chest.

Navigating my oceans of sadness, I retreat back to my cavernous room. Hopelessness proudly displays itself within each of my possessions; from my 8-year-old computer to the peeling Taking Back Sunday poster above my bed, which is as cold and hard as granite.

I nurse my cuts and burns on my skin, but the festering wounds upon my nearly nonexistent self-esteem are beyond healing. In the crevice between my sagging bed and the floor lingers my welcoming vodka bottle. Although it is heavy in my hand, the alcohol somewhat lightens my despair. The holy liquid streams down my gulping esophagus, and I longingly suck a the bottle’s opening long after the last drop has wormed its way to my stomach.

School, the imprisoning hell forced upon me every day, picks at my scars and makes them fresh again. I get an F on my math test. I had poured my meager intelligence, effort, and all devotion into the exam, and yet, the spiteful teacher failed me. I have failed myself, and the corrective ink is as red as the blood that pours from the slices on my soul. I know the teacher has done this to me to destroy who I am on the outside. Who I am on the inside has been eroded away into oblivion.

In the bathroom, I run the kind blade across my skin, over and over, until the tissue I press upon the angry slashes grows more saturated with crimson with every beat of my pulse. A smile lifts the corner of my lips into a twisted grin. Without cleaning the red misery from my limbs, I enter the next class.

“Devon! What on earth?” The teacher’s eyes are shiny with fright as she stares at my battle wounds. I have lost my war with myself–again. I can’t handle my own thoughts or emotions anymore. God, please take me!

“Leave me alone,” I tell her. The bitch doesn’t get it. No one understands. They think they can comprehend me enough to manipulate and mold me any which way they want me to move and bend. But they’ve bent me too much… and I’ve broken. Everyone stares, and I get cold and clammy inside. They are beginning to see the truth play games on my arms, and now on my desk, as the blood creeps out into the eyeshot of all twenty of my classmates… my enemies. And yet, my nemesis is myself.

“You need to go to the nurse,” insists the teacher.

“You need to go to hell,” a little voice in my head mocks. Without saying a word, I stand up. My hands are growing so weak… they fumble, and the razor drops. It hits the floor, and following the exposure of my choice drug, a hush falls over the class–a deafening silence.

“Devon… you did this to yourself?” The teacher is horrified.

She doesn’t know… she’d do it to herself, too, if her life brought her the suffering it brings me. A wave of guilt washes over my shaking corpse, and I stumble out of the room.

It’s back to the bathroom, and I huddle deep into the corner behind the trashcan to rock back and forth, doubled over my gashes. By now the blood has soaked through my clothes and has grown sticky. But it’s warm and comforting, like taking a hot shower. The tile room spins in and out of focus, and I almost laugh out loud as I realize that I am going to die… finally.

“Do you know why he did this?”

“Should someone call an ambulance?”

“I called his parents.”

“What did they say?”

“They’re coming in to pick him up.”

“The psychologist is here.”

“He’s a crazy dude.”

“Shut up.”

“What a faggot.”

“That’s not nice.”

“Gross!”

“He needs to go to a mental hospital.”

“He needs a real hospital first.”

Multiple voices buzz within my skull, and it takes me a while to realize that I am not in heaven or hell, but instead, I am in the nurse’s office. Hell would be better. Several classmates are hovered over me, and the nurse is shoving her corpulent frame towards me. “You’re a lucky boy,” she says. “Someone found you.”

The shrink is right next to her, and she stares solemnly at the gauze wraps on my wrists and my burgundy-stained clothing. “Why did you do this, Devon?”

I sit up, and although the world starts to swirl, I refuse to faint again. Although, maybe it would be better than facing this humiliation. I am going to give into my fate.

“Because–life sucks and then you die,” I explain my philosophy.

She is shocked at how screwed-up I am, but I could care less. Her face is more wrinkled than my tattered Prozac Memory shirt, which has now been ruined by my own emotional release. But now the tension has become a tidal wave inside of me, and there isn’t shit I can do about it in this public place. I wish I had someone to listen to me. My razor was a better listener than my now ex-girlfriend.

I storm from the office, and run down the halls as the nurse starts to chase me. “You can’t run away!” she yells. “The ambulance is coming! And so are the cops!”

Her statements only encourage me as I panic and sprint straight for the front doors. They are the gates to hell, and yet I run through them, breaking free and running AWAY from the hell I know I will never return to.

My father is standing there, a lonely figure standing between two anorexically emaciated trees. His thin face is pinched in pain… I know it’s the pain of the sadness he feels not for me, but for my failed suicide. He wishes I could have succeeded.

“Devon,” he whispers as I freeze and he approaches me. Frustration deforms every one of his features, and I see myself in his grimace. “I am so disappointed in you.”

The cold little voice in my head chants, “I know, Dad. I know you want me to die. I know, Dad. I know you want me to die. I know, Dad. I know you want me to die….” I try to stay silent, but my attempt is vain and I shriek my words of injury to him.

The nurse is huffing behind me, and I dart from her reach. Sirens screech in the distance, and it’s vital that I escape. Not only do I want to escape from the open plaza in front of the school, where I stand in my vulnerability, I also want to escape from the face of this uncaring earth. God is deaf to my nightly prayers for recovery. Instead, I know He laughs while He watches, fascinated, as I scream and cry myself to sleep each night. My hopeless future is as real to me as my white studded belt that hugs my waist.

My scruffy sneakers scrape the pavement as I blindly cross the highway. I am in the right place at the right time… the ambulance comes blaring around the corner, and slams straight into my already wrecked body with fatal violence. Thrashing about the asphalt, my horrifically mutilated torso splattered over the yellow lines, my severed leg not even a foot from my crushed face, I shriek and shriek until my voice quavers and breaks. Bone fragments are sticking out of my torn flesh, and I even swallow chunks of my destroyed teeth. They come back up and out as I vomit thick, curdled blood from my tattered insides. My father’s gasps and the nurse’s screams form the soundtrack to the last few minutes of my life as I involuntarily fight to suck air into my collapsing lungs. A paramedic leaps from the vehicle, which has stolen my desolate future. He is tilted, as my head is twisted at an unnatural angle; the result of a broken neck. He bends down, and begins to fade into a white mist along with the rest of the landscape as I whisper my final words: “Thank you.”