PART 5: Suicide

Hours later, the morgue door is closed behind me on the corpse that is no longer me, on the shiny clean room and tables that refused to move when I touched them.

Another doctor in a pristine white coat had opened the door, unknowing and untroubled. I had wondered if he thought about the body on the table. If, when he saw the corpse of a teenage girl, he had imagined her grief-stricken parents, her incomplete family, the gaping hole her death would have left. How she might even have been in that room with him, slipping past him without a word. But I doubted it, so I left.

Now I walk through the halls of the hospital, not quite seeing anything, not here but not anywhere else. I pass several people who don't see me in my bloodstained clothes and knotted hair.

On impulse, I reach out to them without speaking; I can't bear their expressionless faces. I attempt to grab one woman's crisp jacket in an effort to pull her over to me, and it slips through my fingers. She continues walking away, not once seeing me.

I try to pull a doctor's clipboard away from him. It stays locked in the air that now seems to be as solid as iron. He doesn't notice me, either.

So I stop trying. And walk faster, trying my hardest not to touch anything or anyone.

After wandering the hospital for what must be the longest period of time I've ever experienced, I manage to find the way out and start the long walk home, because I have nowhere else to go. At least I know the way.

As I walk, I pass people on their way to work, home, lunch, to pick up their children, to continue with their lives. I stay carefully out of their way, to let myself forget for a while that they can't see or touch me.

A large, rumbling truck blows smoke in the distance; I watch it approach, and an idea occurs to me. I stop on the sidewalk, and, when its shadow is looming over the pavement directly in front of me, I step out onto the road.

For several seconds, nothing happens, and the world is deadly still, blissfully silent. I close my eyes.

I can hear the huge truck whistling in the thick, warm air, swimming sluggishly towards me. And I don't even know how or when or anything, but my legs have bunched under me, adrenaline pulsed through my veins, muscles tensed under my skin, and I've flung myself off the road and onto the curb. The protruding cement lip catches me painfully between my shoulder blades and I suck in a breath as the truck, now directly in front of me, hurtles past, 10 tonnes of metal and steam.

Apparently I hadn't wanted to die after all.

So I get up, and there's not even any dirt from the ground on my clothing, but I dust myself off anyways and continue walking home.

And I would cry, but I don't have any tears left.