All the good intentions in the world could not have saved me. Let’s just get that out of the way. Nobody made me do this. It was all me.
Now.. did they make me want to do this? That’s another story.
Everyone acts like it’s this big terrible thing to be alone—a scarlet ‘A’, for alone. But I think being alone and singular within yourself is an accomplishment. In aloneness, I have cut all the cables holding me to the world. Nothing can tether me here anymore. I have no blood to bleed.
Sometimes the ends of us aren’t pretty. Neither are the beginnings: we get here covered with pruned skin and someone else’s blood. It’s what we do in the middle that makes us beautiful. I don’t know when a person begins to live—Their first breath? When someone loves them? When they want to?—or when they die. Neither coming or going happens in increments; we begin to exist instantaneously and leave just as quickly. I do know, though, that what happens during the in-between is a swell and gather of self and purpose. Identity doesn’t occur as randomly as life.
I’m leaving behind a beautiful world. Maybe it’s some warped form of nostalgia that’s making me say that… like signing Elsie Bennett’s yearbook as her ‘best friend’ just because we were graduating and I was never going to see her again. I think I mean it, though. After all my unhappiness, after the misshapen and scarred bit of life I’ve held in my palm, I think I genuinely believe the world and life itself are beautiful creatures. And it’s the people—the basically good people— inside them that make them that way. Life is a complicated, glorious, uneven, dynamic affair. But it’s killing us all.
What’s the difference? I could live maybe another fifty years or I could jump. I could stay here and wait for a miracle that’s never going to come or I can have my moment of beauty and then end it all. There are no guarantees here—I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and die a shiver and scrap of what I could have been. Just once in my lifetime, I want to feel everything that I have the potential to feel: I want to let go and scream and cry and have there be nothing under my feet but yielding air and finally some certainty. It’ll be enough. I think a person lives the most right before they die. There’s an awareness there, a heightening of the senses and a chatter of the pulse. For a while now, I’ve been chasing the next adventure just because I can. And all that time, the greatest adventure of all has been waiting patiently for me to slip into it and claim it as my own.
No one lives as much as they’re meant to. Some people barely live at all. So what’s the difference? Why is my death so unthinkable when all of you sit idly by and let the world slowly extract the venom of life from your veins? Why. Am. I. So. Different? I’m doing what none of you have the courage to do. As nothing more than a girl—not a rare girl, a magnificent girl, or a girl of anything special—I am stepping forward and taking the greatest leap of faith mankind has ever known.
My graduating class voted me Most Likely to Succeed. I’m writing this at five minutes to midnight, sitting above a literal abyss, with my face cluttered and exposed by tears, and with no regrets. I can’t lie—I feel successful. Just know that I want this.
I am dying alone and I am dying brave.