Every Ending Is a Beginning

It was the house where I grew up in, a cabin near the beach in the outskirts of Nevermore. It was where my grandparents died and where I went to die. I was seventeen then, full of booze, incoherent thoughts, and the world was nothing to me. A few days before I found myself there, I was in my parent's house with my father yelling at me, scolding me while my mother did her best to curb my father's anger. He was shouting the same curses and my reply was still the same, silence. My mother meanwhile kept asking the same question, what was happening to me? I already knew the answer, I just couldn't face it. I couldn't tell them I was falling apart.

I was taking up computer engineering in college and I was imploding. The pressure was too much, I didn't want to admit it to myself, to my friends nor to my parents. When I think about it, even my so-called friends never really bothered to ask me why I was drinking all the time. It was the only escape, the only thing that allowed me to detach myself to the world.

In this particular situation, I went to class drunk and somehow I managed to insult both the instructor and the guidance counselor. Even to this day I can't remember fully what happened. All I know is that I went and grabbed a few drinks before I went to class. By the time my blackout was over, the damage was done. I didn't know why I lashed out, the frustration, the pressure? I had no idea what the culprit was.

And so when my father was done yelling at me, telling me how worthless and ungrateful a son I was, I went to my grandparents cabin.

It looked the same, with it's carpeted walls, my grandmother's antique collection, my grandfather's wooden sculptures displayed on a table and a picture. I picked the frame and it was  a photo of both of them with a seven year old me wedged in between. We all looked happy, I remembered that we took it after my grandfather built me a wooden truck from his workshop. I loved playing in the sand and during the afternoon, my grandmother would pack us snacks and we'd walk on the beach, sometimes they'd let me wade in the water.

I felt my eyes sting. I could hear someone screaming. It sounded like a desperate wailing, the sound of a beaten animal. And I realized it was me, the one screaming at the silence.

I had the gun in my hand, finger on the trigger, and the muzzle on my head. I was kneeling in the sand staring at the sea, wondering if I would ever see my grandparents again. The all-consuming need to end the pain and the struggle that made my life a living hell had drowned all reason. I was ready yet a part of me who loved my family, my mother and father knew that it was unfair to leave them like this, without a note, without giving them an answer so I went back to the cabin to write a note. Even then I've already started writing, unfinished prose and reluctant poetry, but this was something else, it was a note that needed to explain the reason of the act I was about to do. I needed to make sure that my parents didn't spend their lives tormenting themselves.

I had the pen in my hand but I couldn't write a damn thing. So I took out my mp3 player and played it on shuffle since I seemed to be able to focus with music in the background.

Instead the pen and the paper became the background, because as soon as the first piano lines of Something I Can Neve Have played, I started to cry. It's funny because I've listened to the song a hundred times, but this was the first time I truly felt it.  And so I found myself listening to the song, letting my tears flow, allowing it to take over what was left of my will to live. I fell asleep with my head on my grandfather's desk sitting, the blank piece of paper lay forgotten.

When I woke up, my resolve to disappear perished. The morning light brought a sense of comfort that the pessimist in me will forever distrust. I took the photograph and kept it with me. I resolved then and there to live, not for myself but for the ones that would've been left behind. I stayed there thinking about all of it, whether I was going to make it through if I stuck with life. All my questions were left unanswered and though I did live that day, I lived like a dead man, a zombie unfeeling and removed from the world.