There's something brutal about feeling a blade slip into the skin of your wrist and knowing that you did it to yourself. Knowing that, for whatever reasons may be plaguing your mind, you felt like you deserved to have the pain that accompanies your actions. The sick numbness that filters across your body is enough for you to understand that what you wanted was genuine, and nobody could have stopped you if they tried. It's a feeling you get when everything seems to be going exactly the way it should be going... almost like everything was finally perfect in your life.
I felt that perfection two years ago when I realized that all I had ever wanted was to be gone. There was something about the thought of leaving this worthless existence that managed to make me smile whenever it came to mind. I would think of everything that I could do in another life, maybe in a life where nobody knew me for what I was. For the first time in all of my twenty-something year living death, a feeling of pureness washed over me until I yearned for what I shouldn't be given.
My death suddenly became top priority on my list, more important than my job and even more important than the people who constantly occupied the space around me. It's wasn't something I could just announce out in the open, because that would have produced more problems than were solved, and that was not a distraction I could afford anyway. The problem with me even beginning to contemplate suicide was that I had lived with a group of friends, off and on, for about seven years. Our families were mutual friends who wanted the best for their children, and apparently the best was all of us at the same college... sharing the same house.
"Teaches them how to make it in the long run."
We all are rich brats from rich families who, at the time, thought it was cruel and unusual punishment for our parents to wish such a "horrible experience" upon us. Who would have thought that that horrible experience had turned into something much more entertaining than a regular college life? It was better than the six months I stayed in a dorm room with a coke-addict and the young prick who thought he knew every goddamn thing about life. My housemates and I started to love the place we hated until we became good friends with each other. Everything was smooth sailing most of the time, and when our parents came over, all we had to do was hide the essentials in the closets and they'd be none-the-wiser.
To them, we were still their "good boys" who wanted nothing but to achieve and become what we always wanted to become.
"My son wants to be a doctor."
"My son's on his way to being a lawyer."
"My son's going into business."
What would they have said if they realized that their innocent boys were making homemade beer in the basement and selling it for six a can to underage high school students? What would Mrs. Barton do if she had found out that her son was the one who taught the rest of his friends the process of making alcohol? Oh, I'm sure she would have found that highly prestigious. So, what the hell's wrong with me, you say? A group of kids in a house all by themselves, making and selling beer to minors for money. Free falling through the trip that is life much easier than everyone else who ever tried.
When it came down to it, I was doing nothing with my life and that bothered me. For the longest time, I remember how I used to feel when I lived back home with my parents. From the time I was born, up to age fifteen, I was bitched at because I "wasn't like my father", who fought in the war and slowly went insane after the damn thing ended. Oh, sure... I wanted to hear voices and cry out to everyone who would listen because at one time in my life, I was never a hero but always came across as being one. That's my token sarcasm shining through, mind you.
When we were first thrown into what I used to call my "home", I had to room with a kid who grew up in Russia because his family used to travel a lot. True American gone Russian, Duo Maxwell was one of the most annoying people I had ever met because all he spoke was bits of Russian intertwined easily with snippets of English. See, when we first got there, we all despised the idea greatly because well... despite what they say... rich boys don't get along well. Especially rich boys who hate being rich boys. Anyway, we put our names into a hat and drew out who our roommate would be. Lucky me, I got the Russian kid who looked like he wanted to stab me at any random moment of the day. The first night, I almost feared going to sleep because he was pacing around the bedroom like a rabid animal, mumbling nonsense to himself in his familiar tongue.
Duo's quite a character once you get to know him, believe me. It took me about a week to look passed the language barrier and see that he may have been a good person once you got to know him. Of course, I couldn't mention this to him or else I would have come across as lower in his book, and the damn Russian Yankee wasn't about to get me to toss my guard down just for him. He was studying to become a veterinarian at the time, ripping up his textbooks and posting random pages of the skeletal structure of numerous animals that he wanted to take care of. Heck, at one moment in our lives, I remember how I stood in front of a picture of a dissected horse wondering why he wanted to do that.
Mysteries of existence, eh?
All Duo came to the house with was a suitcase full of clothing, and another one full of books and CDs. Now, the clothing was what he kept and wore for himself. The CDs and books were what he sold out of the trunk of his car to poor fools who didn't have enough money to buy it for the store prices. He kept the money for himself in the beginning, and then donated it to Trowa to get supplies needed for us to successfully make the booze. Everything sold out of his trunk after that was immediately spent to help our... shall we say... secondary business. I got a job when I was nineteen after Duo ran out of stuff to sell and was lacking on getting enough funds from the parent-figures to buy more crap. Sometimes, I even heard him rambling to his mom on the telephone, snippets of "books" and "need for school" telling me all I needed to know.
Damn fool even fell for her son's spiels.
Duo being one of the main sources of our temporary income, we all somehow knew that he couldn't use the "I need it for school" card more than was necessary or else his mother would catch on. Back to my job. At nineteen, I tried out for a columnist job at a bootleg local newspaper and got it. For about a year and a half, I wrote up a series of 5-paragraph stories involving why drugs are bad and kids should not do them. Every Friday when they were published, we would all sit together in the living room, read it out loud, and then participate in a ritualistic burning of the article.
That was a blast.
Chang Wufei was the aspiring doctor, as his parents always gloated about whenever they were near or around anybody who may have know him. I had to endure an hour-long tale about why he probably wanted to be a doctor, and how proud they are of him. It's all bullshit, I'll tell you that now. This Chinese kid wanted to be a professional criminal, one that was so good he couldn't be caught, you know? He had robbed three gas stations already by 18, stolen fourteen sweaters from separate department stores, and even snagged a gold watch off of an old woman at the bus stop. Won't his parents be so proud to know that their kid was studying to be a doctor by day, but by night he was wreaking havoc on everyone but his friends? If he ever ended up in jail, all he'd have to do was call one of us and we would work to bail him out. How's that for connections?
Trowa Barton, as I mentioned before, was Wufei's roommate and the mastermind behind all the alcohol sales. Apparently as a kid, he had watched his father making some with a group of friends, and the rest—as they say—is history. If you let him watch you do something for a couple of minutes, he'll catch on so fast it'll surprise you. He's mastered slight of hand and pick pocketing after watching Quatre work on the streets.; He even picked up numerous phrases of Russian from Duo. He's such a fucking genius, it's almost annoying.
Quatre Rebarba Winner was a kid who looked like he had dreams. Too bad those dreams were wasted on a group of low-life richies who knew what they wanted and how. Blondie still has a wonderful way of being sweet to get what he wants, and did provide the source of Trowa's most-recent street skills. All he has to do is brush up against some unsuspecting fool on the sidewalks, and he'll walk away with a wallet and some jewelry. If he really wanted, he could get the person's tie off while he's trying to brush them off, acting cute and apologizing the whole time to distract. Oh, sir.. I am terribly sorry. I really must look where I'm going! I'm so clumsy! To be quite frank, I've never laughed as hard watching anyone work than when I get to watch him. It is so funny, it's just that much closer to being wrong to witness.
Now, it's either a miracle or a punishment for five individuals so crooked to get the chance to be crooked together in one home. Personally, I consider it to be a Godsend because I hadn't had any friends quite like them before and I was actually starting to suspect that what I, myself, was doing was wrong. Have I not mentioned my little quirks yet? Oh, my apologies.
My parents gave me everything I could have wanted as a kid, and once they found out that I was a fan of computers, they sent me to every class that I could ever dream of. Granted, it wasn't a horrible childhood outside of the fighting and the accusations about how my life was already turning out to be a disaster. My parents had... conceived me when they were both a little too drunk for comfort, so I guess you could call me an accident. Being high-status figures, an abortion would have given my mother so much fucking hell. So, she decided to just have me to satisfy the public people and make everyone happy. Well, how could you not love me? I suck everyone in with my good looks and debonair personality. Please, don't miss that sarcasm.
Eventually, they started to treat me like I wasn't a fly sitting on the clean wallpaper and more as a son. For starters, they had no right to even imagine treating me negative after they were so irresponsible that they had sex and produced me. Can you tell I'm not a huge fan of my parents?
Anyway. They sent me to computer class after computer class to try and make me happy. After I had hit the next door neighbor's kid with a gardening tool and left him while he bled in the backyard, my parents felt like some attention might have been good for me. They eventually figured that if they already had the damn thing, they might as well fix it up. So, they began their sick attempt at making me into my father, which failed horribly. They found this out when I was twelve and they woke up to find me aiming my father's hunting rifle in between where they rested on the bed. A sick sense of accomplishment filled me as my mother screamed and my father started shouting out obscenities, asking me what the fuck I thought I was doing.
I wanted to tell them that all I was doing was aiming a hunting rifle, but I don't think they would have liked that.
It all basically started when I was sitting in my computer class after the teacher had left to talk to a parent who had stopped by. She had been gone for about three minutes and I had already accidentally gotten into the teacher's log. It was one of those light bulb flashing on moments in my life where all I wanted to do was to try that again and again and again. I wanted to try it until I could do it and know how it happened, you know? By the time she had gotten back, I had left the program and entered it four more times. What a motherfucking rush...
So, I'm the resident hacker. The worst and best I could do was take little amounts out of each of our families accounts and move them to our joint account. That's a risky procedure, but I didn't take so much where it was obvious that it was gone. My parents, for one, were very loose when it came to their bank accounts. All they knew is they had money, and a lot of it. They didn't necessarily check every now and then just to see if 20 bucks was missing. Twenty bucks taken from five accounts, the task completed about twice a week. It sure as hell added up if we gave it some time. Quatre pawned everything he pocketed like Wufei pawned everything he stole. Duo still managed to milk his parents for everything he could get, saying he really wanted it or really needed it, and they would give in so fast by buying it for him. He sold everything he got for a little less than his parents actually paid for it to keep business going, so we weren't out too much money.
We talked each day about what we had spent and what we were going to spend, discussing dinner like it was the most important thing in our lives. After all the discussion, we would always end up going to a fast food restaurant and treating ourselves to junk. When we got home, somebody's parent would always call and we would always lie and say we ate at the most expensive place in town, or we cooked a lovely noodle dish or something.
Everything was... imperfectly perfect.
All of this twisted perfection started to wear on us, though. I suppose we each had a dream at one time that was ruined under some circumstance or another, but mainly we were all holding each other back. We were getting along in such a way that people probably shouldn't, and we were causing each other to spiral downwards just because we were all doing the same thing. Duo started to cry at nights more and more often, so emotional that he couldn't spit out a bit of English so I could never understand him. He would look at me and ask me questions that I wish I could answer for him, but something in his mind never allowed him to clear it up in a way I could understand.
We stopped our business for a while to get some much-needed relaxation into the fray, but mainly to get our emotions in check. Wufei finally got arrested like we had all predicted, and instead of them giving him his one phone call, they called his parents and spoke directly about the problem. Actually, we didn't see him for two months after that mistake because his parents had been so upset they let him spend his assigned time behind bars. Damn fools. Sporting a black eye and a wrist brace, he walked through the front door, winked at all of us, and went upstairs to his and Trowa's room.
Quatre tried to pocket off of the wrong person once, and ended up bleeding in the park somewhere. Trowa and I had to make good use of sunlight and we searched for him for a couple of hours before finally stumbling across him. Whoever beat him up took his coat, his glasses, and his boots. The first thing he said to us was if he was going to lose his stuff, he could have gotten money off of them before it all happened. It was a bittersweet reaction, but we all laughed and managed to truck back home.
It was this chain of events that was the beginning of the end in my mind. Everything was happening too close together for us to write it off as being unlucky. None of us had ever been caught before, and two of our little team managed to get seen and were taken care of respectively. Two months after Quatre was fully recovered, save for a couple of battle wounds that he showed off to Duo, the bad luck spun in my direction.
I was playing a game of checkers with Duo, who did not know how to play at all, when the phone rang and I was rewarded with the exciting news that my father had passed away. My mother's frantic voice shot away any of the happiness I could have felt as I also heard that my dad had left all of his money to a fucking girlfriend that he had kept on the side. If he hadn't gotten hit by the damn car, I would have gone straight over to my old home and shot him in the fucking balls for betraying my family like that. After all, he upset my mother and cut off half of what I could have stolen that would have helped me and my friends.
Duo accompanied me to the funeral to restrain me from running up to his corpse and ruining his peaceful body. Fortunately for both of us, my mother beat me to the chase and managed to land one hard punch before my uncle pulled her off. The rest of the evening was wonderful from there on out, and all I had to do was wish that they would drop his ass on the way to the cemetery. Too bad they didn't, because that would have made my life complete.
As it stands, our general income was starting to lack from more source than one. I felt too guilty to take what little money my mom had, and my friends respected this entirely. Duo's mother was hesitating more and more when he asked her for stuff, going so far as to actually decline giving him anything for a couple of months. Wufei was being watched like an endangered species, the cops watching every little thing he did. The weather was so hectic at the time that nobody wanted to go outside, so Quatre was out of a job. Trowa didn't get enough money from his own family to be able to keep the alcohol production at a high level, and he eventually got us to throw in the towel for a while and work on keeping ourselves fed.
We ate cheap, but we never went hungry.
And all my bad thoughts came flooding back in as soon as I didn't have anything to do. I hacked into some business computers just for fun, but that grew tiring after a while considering we weren't gaining anything from it. It was then that I realized that everything bad I had been doing was to keep negative thoughts out of my mind in the first place. At nights, I waited until Duo was peacefully sleeping, and then I would try and work out what I could do that would make me happy again. Sometimes I would go downstairs and find Trowa staring at the off television, wrapped in blankets with his head propped on his knees. When I questioned him, he would say the same thing. We don't have enough money to waste it on something so stupid as watching TV.
To clear something up, Trowa was a TV junkie when we actually had enough money for minor things such as cable and whatnot. When he had to give that up, that was like a mother giving up her firstborn for some corn and a blanket. I felt sorry for him, but it was a necessary substitution for... oh, say... clean drinking water. Quatre had to give up his ice cream, which nearly killed him because he's addicted to sugar and sweets. Hell, we all made sacrifices to keep each other alive.
I got a call again when I was with Duo, us sitting together on his bed and staring at the photocopies of the bone structures of animals. That was one of the things that he had decided to give up. Being a vet wasn't a top priority thing to him at the time like dying was one to me. I know, I know. The whole death issue pops up very randomly, but it popped up into my mind as soon as I got that phone call. My aunt gave me a ring and told me that my mother had OD'd on painkillers and they found her dead that very morning. I was a little sad when I heard the news, but when I hung up and saw Duo staring at me with curiosity, I didn't have the heart to tell him that the rest of my immediate family was gone now, too. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I was suddenly dependent on my friends to be my family.
The issue was dropped and we stared at the pictures again. Even though it wasn't a top priority to him, I could still tell he was depressed because he was very serious about it at one time. Almost like Wufei was very serious about becoming a doctor, and Trowa seriously wanted to be a lawyer. Quatre wanted to be in business, and I just wanted to be known for something. Anything would have been good.
Like I mentioned, we all had dreams at one time.
When I was sitting with Duo on that bed, I realized for the first time that I no longer had a dream. All I really hoped for was that all of us wouldn't be caught for what we've done, or what we might have done after that and that we would all be in good health. I didn't want my friends to be hurt, but that was basically it. I couldn't even send any negativity towards my father's whore of a girlfriend because I didn't know her and she might not have known that my father was unhappily married.
We were in our twenties, and had no plans for the immediate future outside of keeping ourselves fed and healthy until something better popped up. I had basically bought my way through school up until that point in time, and my family was no longer pulling strings to get me to the top anymore. My family was nice and dead, and I was the last standing in our little triangle. I was the last standing, and I wasn't doing anything to keep the name in a positive light. Oh, yeah... what a shame. That kid's family died so young, but he did turn out to be a success. I can't believe the things that young boy has accomplished! And only in his twenties! Gracious...
I started to plan out the rest of my existence and how I would pull it off without being caught.
I didn't have a dream left, so why should I live?
I've told you earlier that I felt bliss when the blade of a knife is in the skin, so I can't lie and say I really thought out my options much. I just automatically assumed I would use a knife because it seemed like it would hurt the most in my mind. Quatre had a gun under his bed that his parents bought him when he got mugged. Fancy how that works. The kid grows up to be a damn mugger, technically speaking, but at one time was so terrified he had to carry a weapon everywhere he went. Facing ones fears, eh?
Did I ever want to use his gun? I thought about it.
I thought about it and denied that option. That would be taking the easy way out, and I didn't want to take the easy way out. I would have thrown myself down the damn steps if I had known that it was a sure-fire way to get the job over and done with. Considering there's a high possibility that I would roll or land wrong, that didn't seem like a good way to die. I mean, if I actually had to throw myself down the staircase more than once, I think I would have lost my nerve eventually.
I set everything up so perfectly, too. Goddammit, I even made sure to send Duo out on a little errand because the others were already gone. Quatre had chosen that day to go see his parents, Trowa had gone to treat himself to a haircut because stuff started to get caught in his bangs, and Wufei had planned to go grocery shopping to find something cheap for dinner. Duo and I were the only ones who didn't have anything to do, so I had to get Duo out of the house somehow. Downright lying to him, I gave him money from my own damn pocket and told him I had a headache. Being the good little Russian prick that he was, he agreed whole-heartedly to go to the drugstore and see if he couldn't pick up some cheap, brand name aspirin or something.
Alone with my thoughts, I actually came to the conclusion that writing a note would have been a moot gesture. In any case, as soon as Duo left the house, I had rushed down to the kitchen and grabbed the sharpest knife I could find. Surprisingly, it wasn't too sharp to begin with so I ditched that idea and decided to use one of Trowa's razors instead. I know, I know... but a razor blade is so unoriginal! Use something better! Well, as soon as you turn suicidal, I'd like to see how straight-forward your thought process is. If you can honestly come up with something better, then more power to you.
The blade was sharp enough to get the job done, and I guess I would have used a butter knife if it would have sent me out of this world. Of course, I would've had to saw into my flesh a little, but I'm pretty sure it would have cut anyway. Willpower, my friends. Sheer willpower will get the job done.
Anyway... where was I?
As soon as I had the razor blade, I went back to mine and Duo's room, and straight to the joint bathroom. Easier to clean up, you must understand. I was trying to be considerate to my housemates who would have had to clean the shit up. Better on tile than on carpet. That's all I started to worry about when I pressed the blade against my wrist. I started to think that what I was doing was wrong because my friends would be stuck cleaning it up. Sad, isn't it? Hesitating because I was worried about the clean up.
I could drag this on for hours, but why insist?
With one wrist cut fairly deep, I started to panic and regret actually doing it. Imagine me lying on the tile floor, blood already beginning to smear and make a royal mess, and my mind screamed at me to kindly inform me of my mistake. What, are you stupid? Why the hell did you do that? You made a mistake! What a fucking dummy...
Oh, we predicted this at the beginning, didn't we? Of course.
The numbness was just starting to settle into my body as I rested there, my clean hand wrapped around my damaged wrist. I was freaking out up until my whole body just seemed to relax and accept the fate that was pushed upon me. The white ceiling light was droning in and out of focus until all I saw was this beautiful white light spread out ahead of me like... well... Heaven or some shit like that. I seriously believed that I was dead and "moving towards the light", and soon everything would be a-okay.
Yes, of course that's the case. Nothing is ever that easy. It's easy like that in the damn movies, but not in real life, folks. You don't die peacefully without an ounce of pain just because you really want to die or something. I was in a shit-load of pain on the floor of the fucking bathroom. Sure... I felt all kinds of dignified and justifiable. I was dying in style!
Enter unsuspecting victim.
Duo walked into the bedroom at that very moment, his voice splitting through the violence raging on in my head to announce that he found some aspirin for a really cheap price and even had change. The harsh English he spoke cut off as he realized I wasn't in the room, and I could almost feel him walking towards the bathroom, you know? Just strolling on over, about to see me at my most pathetic.
Shit, it's funny when I think about it now.
If I wasn't in so much pain, I would have laughed when he opened the bathroom door and let his eyes ghost over my body. . He stood in the doorway for just a moment, before he threw the small paper bag with the pill bottle at me and started to scream. Started to scream... colorfully... in Russian, by the way. I winced slightly as the pill bottle hit me square in the forehead, and then I was in his arms and it didn't really matter anymore. There was a wild horror in his eyes as he looked at me, his hair sliding across his skin as he leaned forward to help me put pressure on my wrist.
His emergency cell phone was used to call the hospital, and quite possibly Quatre considering he was at his parent's house, but I can't be too sure. All I know is that I watched him worry and fret over me and I felt sorry that I had made him like me as much as his obviously did. I felt guilty for not being an ass to him so he wouldn't have been angry at the passing of his roommate. Hell, if I was gone, Wufei could have moved in with him and gotten himself out of that small bedroom that he was quite fond of in the first place.
When everything managed to settle down and all we could really do was wait, I closed my eyes and listened to his soft breathing. His tight grip on my wrist was painful and comforting at the same time, him occasionally squeezing roughly when he thought I was trying to go to sleep. Jesus, all I really wanted to do was go to sleep and that's the first thing he prevented me from doing. Damn Russian Yankee... doesn't know when to keep his nose out of other people's business.
When Quatre burst into the room god-knows how much later, I felt helplessness replace the numbness because everything seemed to be looking up. He and Duo picked me up and managed to get me downstairs so we all could wait for the ambulance like a big happy family. As soon as they arrived, Quatre was the designated caller and stayed home to try and get in contact with... anyone who might listen, probably. Duo rode with me in the ambulance, sitting out of the way and watching me like I was the Devil himself in the form of a young man. I wanted to open my mouth and call him a prick just if it would make him smile or show any other variation of emotion outside of anger. Did I forget to mention? Duo loves it when I insult him. Chances are, though, he doesn't understand half of what I'm saying, either.
Making my wish come true, he winked at me and turned to look at the driver for a brief moment. The man behind the wheel must have been talking or something, because his lips started to move as he gave a reply. Poor bastard of a driver must have been shocked to hear one of the incoherent sentences that Duo offers up to whoever he talks to. You would think after about seven years, the kid would have picked up something other than "good morning", "where we eat?" and "going to bed".
He watched me when I was in the ambulance and when they took me into the hospital to get helped. I heard him talking on the phone as soon as they stabilized me and managed to get me into a room. When I was nearing sleep, he was sitting beside me in the uncomfortable wooden chair that they put in every single room. To show that he was uncomfortable, he kept shifting every couple of minutes, mumbling to himself and making small noises of displeasure.
In the haze of medication, I couldn't help but notice him watching me.
My roommate smiled whenever he caught my eye, trying to make the best out of a shitty situation. He smiled and winked to show that he wasn't so pissed off that he would ignore me or anything. I guess he wanted to show me that he was with me no matter what... or some immature, movie-made phrase like that that never seems to be true when you hear it outside of the movie screen.
I had wanted to be gone... to be saved.
It took me a while to realize that my beautiful salvation had been right in front of my very eyes.
It took me a while to realize that I was saved and hadn't accepted it until it was almost too late.
I am truly alive now, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Damn Russian Yankee... making me feel alive again. And I didn't even do anything illegal to achieve it!