Nine Lives

Life never liked me. It was always finding a clever and new way to really screw me over. I work a dead end job, in front of a computer in an office. Nobody knows I exist or even my name, I could walk into the office wearing a bright pink leotard and not attract even a bit of attention to myself.

I have never had a friend, ok, that's a lie. I had one in the form of a goldfish that you win at the fair. Now I never had won anything in my life before, and never have since. So of course being an immature ten year old I was giddy as hell. I won a goldfish, though of course life had given me a faulty goldfish who died three hours after getting him home.

So that friendship got flushed down the toilet, quite literally I might add.

Now finding a girlfriend is something I've never even bothered with, hell if a fish wouldn't even be my friend why bother with something like a girlfriend? So yes I put the pathetic back into the thirty year old virgin.

Now that I have explained why my life is total crap and this is why I tried to commit suicide. Usually people try to commit suicide they only try a couple of times, average being about two or three attempts. Even some of the brave ones actually succeed at killing themselves, but of course not me.

I tried nine times. Every act of suicide I could think of or heard of I did and of course since life hates me so much it wouldn't even grant me the cool rush of relief of death. Life is so selfish sometimes. Like come on! I just wanted to die and get it over with; it sounded way more productive then my present life was.

My first attempt was with a long piece of thick yellow cord and the red maple tree in my backyard. After tying the cord on one of the lower branches, I looped it around my neck. Now I intended to hang myself, though when I bent my legs off the ground, letting the tree branch take on my full weight. It breaks.

I slam into the ground, the branch falling onto my chest. So of course I cursed the heavens, holding the stick up to them in my hand after I had picked myself up from the ground and dusted my pants off.

This made me way more determined to have my second attempt work. I was always told while growing up to go play in traffic. Now you're probably assuming that classmates told me to go do this. Wrong. My mother did, she even tried to push me off the sidewalk into the busy street. It's nothing like a mother's love when she tries to push her only son off the sidewalk and to his death.

Though this time I walked into traffic voluntarily and you can guess easily on what happened with this second attempt of suicide. Every car on the road stopped and refused to run me over. Do I have a neon sign over my head that says 'Save me!' or something? No normal person could ever be this damn lucky!

I decided to try a more popular form of suicide this time. I never had tried to shoot a gun before, hell I hadn't touched one before this time. So with my lack of experience with guns I didn't know you had to load the gun with bullets for it to actually work.

I was standing in the middle of my living room with the gun to my temple, a complete classic in the suicide handbook. I pulled the trigger and nothing happened, absolutely nothing. Well that was a complete waste of time.

Now the most popular suicide thing that teenagers are into is slitting their wrists. How did they even come up with this idea? How did something so bloody and messy become to irrationally cool? Well I tried it, real razor and all. Do you know how much that fucking hurts! It felt like I was actually dying (though I knew I wasn't). I cried, me, a full grown thirty year old man cried after slitting his wrist because all the cool kids are doing it.

This time I decided that I least popular form would really kill me. My favourite food is toast. So of course I own a toaster and I have seen the movie The Ring. Like when that crazy old man goes into the tub of water, holding onto a toaster and gets electrocuted? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

Well I filled my tub with water and got my toaster, I sat in the tub waiting to be electrocuted and to become my favourite food. So I waited, and waited an after waiting I waited some more. It took me four days and five nights to realize I never plugged in the toaster to begin with. Wet and tired, I decided to not even bother to plug the toaster in.

Standing above a busy overpass, I was going to make walking into traffic child's play. This time I was going to drop into traffic. I jumped into the thin air without even thinking about it. Falling was actually the best experience I had ever had, falling into oblivion without seeing the world around you except for the fast blur of colours.

Now this was my chance to finally die, but of course it didn't happen. How? You ask. Well I fell into a garbage truck, five feet into stinking garbage.

On the front of the paper the very next day it said 'Garbage truck saves suicidal man from a violent death!' how cliché.

Though these near fatal, though not enough fatal to kill me, attempts were just not enough to convince me that suicide was just not meant to be. So this time I tried a whole different bridge.

The water at the bottom of the bridge looked shallow, the side at the side said 'Warning: Shallow Water' so of course I decided that this would be the best attempt. No way for life to keep me alive. The fall would break my neck, an instant death.

I knew from the time I hit the water, I knew that looks can be deceiving and that even signs can lie. I couldn't drown myself, to much of a struggle to try to keep my body under water.

So again, completely drenched, I lugged myself back to my house. I was totally out of ideas except for one. Animals totally hate me, so maybe a bear or a mountain lion would find me easy prey and kill me. So I of course wandered into the woods, looking for the biggest and most badass bear I could find.

I found one, a big brown grizzly bear. We stared each other off for a good five minutes, until he seemed to give me this screaming roar. For split second, hope burst inside my chest. Finally! Something was actually going to kill me, but no. The bear had turned high tail and ran at a fast lope away from me and into the thick bush.

After this last and dismal eighth attempt I gave up on trying to kill myself. I barely slept that night, and I was so tired while eating my breakfast the next morning. I finally gave up on fighting my tiredness and fell asleep at the table.

Face down, in my full of milk cereal bowl. I drowned. In my cereal bowl that is filled with milk.

Cereal had actually killed a thirty year old man, after all his attempts of trying to commit suicide. My nine lives had apparently run out. Thank god for cereal.