This memory is the most painful memory that I have lived through, so far. Some of these parts may be difficult to read. So you aren’t worried when you read this, I am no longer like this and I am happy with my life. On June 23, 2012, around 3:00pm, I attempted to commit suicide.

I scream inside my head. I know my face is fixed in stone, but I can’t bring myself to care. Let me die, let me die, let me die. I stare at the man sitting next to me in the ambulance, hating him with a ferocity that would usually surprise myself.
“What’s your name?” he asks me. He fiddles with something in the cabinet, then turns around with some tubing in his hand.
“Kara,” I mumble in a dead whisper. This answer is easy, one I can actually answer, unlike the questions my dad and sister asked at the house. They asked me the ever-complicated question: why? I don’t know why, I’m just tired of doing the same depressing things over and over. I want people to miss me.
“Well, Kara, I’m going to put an IV in your arm and some oxygen in your nose, alright?” the man asks, though I don’t know why he does. He’s just going to do what he wants anyways.
“Fine,” I whisper. Whatever. I don’t care what people do to me anymore. I flex my bandaged wrist and hide a small smirk. It doesn’t even hurt! It’s not even red. I should have pressed harder with the knife. Oh well, tool late now, I guess.
“You’re going to need stitches,” he says. I look up to see he’s noticed me staring at my wrist. I fight the urge to smirk again, trying to keep a cool expression fixed on my face.
He sticks the tubing in my nose and with a click cool air starts pouring out. It feels weird, like I’m lightheaded and cold inside my brain, almost the feeling you get when you’re in an airplane.
“Are you ready?” He holds up the object that’s supposed to connect my body to an IV. I give the smallest of nods and turn my head to stare at my arm, anticipating the prick of the needle.
“This may hurt a bit,” he says right before he eases it into my arm. It does hurt a bit, but I enjoy that part. This physical pain pushes back the emotional pain that I’m going through.
I turn my head away and close my eyes, feeling faint because of the many blood thinner pills in my system. I hear the snip of scissors and then the bitter smell of some kind of bubble gum medicine.
I open my eyes to see him holding a tube in front of my face and he says, “This is called charcoal. It tastes nasty, and you’re going to want to throw up when you drink it. It will also stain anything it touches black, so unless you want to look like a zombie with black lips, I’d avoid touching the liquid to any part of your body.” He then hands me the tube and stands there, staring at me expectantly.
The smell nauseates me. It smells like actual vomit now that it’s closer to my face. I stare inside the tube at the thick, black sludge for a long moment, uncomprehending. The heaters blast the smell towards my face again, and I grimace. Something so unbearably gross in smell could not taste very well.
He notices the expression on my face and chuckles, “Yeah, nasty right? Well, at least they upgraded us to the better tasting stuff.” He goes back to standing in silence and staring at me.
Well, bottoms up, I guess. I bring the tube slowly to my lips, careful of the liquid inside, and tilt it back hastily, gulping down the sludge quickly. It tastes chunky and chalky. The smell also did not deceive the taste: it, too, tasted like vomit. I choke and turn the tube up, drizzling the slime along my chin.
“Oops,” the man says. He grabs a napkin and starts wiping my chin off, then just stands back and looks at the tube. “All of it.”
I glance down, and sure enough, there was some more torture gunk waiting for me. This time, when I tilted the charcoal back, I wasn't that careful. The bottom half of my face was already stained black, so how much worse could it get? I drowned myself, choking every time I swallowed. Would the agony of living never end?

I lay on the hospital bed, staring desperately at the door, hoping my mom would come running in and take me into her arms. I hate the man who calls himself my dad sitting next to me. He couldn't even trouble himself to say anything to me. All he does is read his A.A. book and talk to god. What an ass. If he cares about me so much, why can't he even talk?
The doctor walks in and, to my disappointment, it's a guy. I'm scared of guys. I really don't want to have one touch me.
"Ms. Piquet, the nurse told me that you threw up. How are you feeling?" he asks. He picks up a clipboard from the dresser and starts writing on it, as if he didn't care what my answer would be.
"Fine," I sigh. What I really want to say is 'terrible, so how about you leave me alone and take this statue sitting next to me with you, 'kay?' but of course I don't say that. I'm too polite to say my opinions.
He stops scribbling and grabs my left arm, unwrapping the bandages from my wrist and revealing the gauges that show muscles and veins. He bends close to the three marks and then prods the skin around them. After he's done with that, he stands up and walks over to the dresser.
"What do you think? How many stitches should we do?" he asks a male nurse that I hadn't noticed before. The doctor grabs some blue wire, scissors, and a needle and walks towards me again.
The nurse also takes a look at my marks and says, "Three maybe, for the middle one, and two for the bottom." The doctor nods and hands the nurse the items, then writes something else on the clipboard, shakes hands with my dad, and leaves.
"Kara, I'm going to give you something to help numb your wrist," the nurse says. He doesn’t wait for the reply that I didn't have, but instead he sticks a needle into the middle slit on my wrist and inserts the liquid into my system. He removes the needle after the liquid is cleared and stands there waiting for a couple of minutes. When he apparently deems that the drugs have kicked in, he starts to prepare the thread and needle, which makes me a little nervous because I've heard that stitches can be painful.
"Ready?" asks the nurse. He places the needle against my skin and waits. I take a deep breath and nod. He the starts to sow my flesh back together, going in and out of my skin. I don't know what everyone was talking about before, I can't feel thing!
He snips the strand and ties it in a knot. It's not painful, but once again I feel bile rise in the back of my throat. Oh. No. I can't hold it in, so I throw up all over myself.

They've moved me to a room upstairs, where there is a person sitting next to my bed reading. I was confused at first. Then, after they explained that as I was suicidal, I had to be under constant surveillance, I was livid. How dare they make me go pee right in front of someone?! I love my privacy, and it's not like I'm going to kill myself with toilet paper.
They've attached my IV to some kind of cool liquid that's supposed to keep me hydrated, when all it's really doing is giving me a strange numb feeling in my arm.

Mom still hasn't showed. I'm a little hurt by it. Shouldn't I be more important than work? All I have right now is this man who just glares at me and reads his A.A. and another man who I don't even know. I just want my mom.
At midnight, my mom comes in and sends my dad home. At first, I'm grateful. My mom has come to comfort me at last. Then I realize, she is livid with me and she's hurt by my actions. She barely speaks to me, and her eyes and nose are red and puffy from crying.
As I stare at her, I realize that I have hurt the person that I love most in the world. I might have just caused irreparable damage to our relationship. Oh god, what have I done? Mommy, I didn't mean it! I'm sorry! Please mommy stay! I need you! She stays that night, but after that she has to go home, and I am left alone a couple days with only my own regret and guilt and a stranger who measures my pee to keep me company.

Mom is starting to forgive me. It's day four in this hospital, and it's three days since I stopped being suicidal. Mom sees how sincere I am, so I hope that that means that she's forgiving me.
All I want to do is go home. I need to feel loved at a time like this. I can't stand this place anymore. It's become my prison. Please, just let me go home.
The therapists who decide what to do with me ask my mom to step out in the hall. Please, please, please, don't send me away again. Just let me go home. I'm better, I promise.
My mom walks back in a couple minutes later and she's sobbing. I know their decision by her reaction, and I can't breathe anymore. I start screaming in my head and I let my tears of agony overcome me.

I rock in the ambulance. I'm unbearably uncomfortable, and once again I am alone. My family follows in the car behind me, but even if they weren't following me they'd know the way to get to our destination. They've traveled it before. The previous February, I was shipped off to a hospital named St. James to be kept under lockdown for five days because of my suicidal tendencies. Now, I was again going to this place that I had considered hell. Life didn't get much worse than this.

The same nurse that was there last time greets me again and says, “Can’t get enough of me can you?” to which I smile and nod my head.
I get the same barren room as last time. The walls are white and dreary and there are two beds against either side of the room. When you first walk in, you see a single bed with drawers beneath and then after you round the corner to the right you see the other bed and a door to the right. This door leads to the bathroom with its yellow floor and white walls. The mirror above the sink to the left is cracked and crude words are scratched into the surface. To the right there’s a toilet and some toilet paper in a hole in the wall. The shower is separated from the toilet by a wall. I hate this shower. It’s freezing cold every time you take a shower and there’s this button on the wall that you have to press every thirty seconds or the water will shut off. If I ever wanted to torture myself, all I’d have to do is stand shivering in the shower. It’s all very spacious…and lonely.
The nurse assigns me the bed closest to the door, the same bed as last time. I’m scared. I hate being closest to any door. A childish fear, I know. I’m also scared of the dark. I was unable to sleep in this room before, so I doubt I will be able to sleep here now only a couple months later.
I sigh dejectedly and give up. There’s nothing I can do. The decisions been made and the doors are locked. I cannot escape.

It’s day five in St. James. Last time they let me go home after five days, so hopefully they’ll follow the same pattern this time. My mom is coming to get me no matter what they decide. She misses me almost as much as I miss her.
I hate it here. They don’t allow you to have any electronics and the only entertainment is a TV behind a glass portion that you have to share with the rest of the people here. Sometimes they bring out guitar hero for the boys to play, which gets annoying after awhile because it’s the same song repeating for hours.
Some of the teenagers and kids are here because, like me, they are suicidal. Others are here because they have anger issues and they almost killed someone. It’s not a very good mixture.
There’s a twelve-year-old boy here named Dante. He has some major anger issues. He’s been here for over a month. These past five days he’s lost his temper every day because of stupid little things, like looking at him the wrong way. Every time he loses his temper, he starts throwing chairs around and starts hitting and cursing the nurses. We have to be locked in our rooms until he calms down. One time, he broke a window. Another, he broke the drinking fountain. Then after that, he toned down his advancements and broke the door between the kitchen and the meeting room.
Every night at nine o’clock, we have to be in our rooms with the door shut. We can’t come out. It doesn’t matter what we do in our rooms, we just have to stay in there and be quiet. I’ve taken up writing in a journal in this time. I can’t sleep, and there’s nothing else for me to do, so I write about how much I miss my mom and how I feel so much better now that I’m not suicidal anymore.
My wrist is almost fully healed now. They took the stitches out a couple days ago. It hurt. They didn’t give me anything to numb my wrist, and they just took a pair a scissor and dug into my scabs and cut, then tugged on the strand. I almost passed out from the pain.
I cry myself to sleep every night. I can’t stay here any more. They don’t allow any open windows, so it’s the same warm air that we’re breathing over and over. I can’t stand it anymore. I need to go home.

Later that day, the therapists decide to let me go, as I’m not suicidal anymore. My mom is almost as happy as me to hear this.
After she takes the two and a half hour drive it takes to reach me, she hugs me and takes me home. I am so grateful to have a mom like her.

After that I never had a suicidal thought again. I am happy to be alive, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.