I tried to die on a Thursday. 

The neighborhood had long grown quiet, save for the chorus of crickets and distant laughter from the bars, and each minute inched closer to dawn. I’d stumbled home from a party I shouldn’t have gone to and told myself that drunk people make impulsive decisions and maybe it was time for an impulsive decision. 

Kicking off my shoes propelled me onto the floor, and I caught myself with my elbows and a thud. I couldn’t help but chuckle because how could I be such a klutz but wasn’t it just my luck that I’d landed in front of my cure?

It had been two years since I first gripped the bottle before me, the label faded with age. I thought back to the first time I took one of those pills. My doctor had promised me it would keep the panic attacks away and she was right because it’s impossible to panic when you’re shoved into a dreamless sleep for twelve hours, only awoken when your boyfriend shakes you and yells in your ear, it’s almost dinner time. 

I don’t know why I had kept all those pills—nearly the entire prescription. I had no use for them; the sleep made me nervous and there had been a time where I didn’t want to sleep my way through life. I had tucked the bottle away in a cabinet, tossed it aside until the sadness overwhelmed me. 

And then I remembered the sleep. 

My hands turned red under the weight of my body and I held my breath for a moment. Impulsive decisions. It could be an impulsive decision. An accident perhaps. Who would ever know? Impulsivity is essentially defined by a lack of planning and a drunken mess collapsed on a bedroom floor was the definition of unplanned decision. 

I hadn’t even written a note. 

Falling asleep was as good a reason as any to pull myself off the floor and onto my bed, collecting my relief as I went. Cap pushed down and turned sharply to the left and there it was: impulsivity. I had counted them all a few days before and told myself just in case but I hadn’t actually planned to do what I did as I plucked the first pill from the bottle. The white oval began to blend into the folds of my palm, a sharp reminder of the intoxication that had all but overwhelmed me. 

Gently, I placed the pill on my tongue, grabbing a half empty bottle of Gatorade, light blue and conveniently placed on my bedside table. Conveniently placed next to the pills. I swished the liquid and swallowed, the bitter taste of the chalky pill mixing with the dulled sweetness of the drink. 

One. I paused for a moment. That was the moment: my chance to stop myself. I asked myself if there was another way but I could still taste the pill in the back of my throat. I had already started, was there a point in calling it quits?

Two. I needed to pick up speed—rush the process along—lest I doubt my resolve again. 

It was between two and three that I heard the water running in the bathroom. I suddenly regretted my decision to bring a friend home with me because God forbid I spend a single night alone. He would re-emerge any minute, catch me in the act, make me stop with a lecture about how things will get better, just hold on. I was tired of holding on. I had clung so hard to a life that didn't feel like mine, my palms aching, skin tearing, slipping and ready to fall. 

The calloused palms created by years of being oh-so-very-strong-and-brave had become the holding cell for my last resort. The smoothness of the pills felt like a sigh of relief. I wouldn't have to white-knuckle life anymore. 

I wasn't sure if I believed in God or heaven, but I figured if heaven was real, perpetual sadness couldn't exist there. I hated the heaviness of desperation so I told myself it was a sick sense of hope instead. I wasn’t desperate for relief. I was hopeful I’d bring it upon myself. 

Three. Four. Five, faster now, sixseveneightnineten.

I had spent the night at a party two blocks away. I didn’t know anyone there but I longed for the sweet release of intoxication. I longed for anything, really. Anything other than the ache in my brain. My roommate had insisted I attend, be social, get out for once goddamnit. I think she had started to worry about the dark bedroom in the corner of the apartment, the one that housed the shell of someone who used to be real, someone who could only sit in the darkness watching Glee and eating junk food. I had started to spend my days shoveling food into my mouth, only ever venturing outside the comfort of my room when my stomach moaned and ached and longed for release. My fingers were perpetually red, torn by my teeth. I never felt the cuts as they developed but by the time the tell-tale sign of my secret formed, I couldn’t feel much of anything anyway. 

Eleven. It wasn’t long after midnight that keys were taken out and sloppy good-byes exchanged. I sipped my vodka mixed with whatever and a familiar face appeared to my right. A smiling face, the corners of a mouth I had once kissed for hours, curling up into cheeks that created an unbearably round frame. 

“Hey”, he cooed with a nod and I knew that I had been backed into a social corner. I kept my response short. Hi. Two letters. One word. Please go away.

He went by a nickname derived from his last name. A name that rhymed with a childish insult but Bouche was so nice that no one dared to call him anything else. I had forgotten his first name long ago. He was a round person who was more athletic than fat. He hadn't played football in years by that point, yet he had retained the solid body that once propelled him down the field. 

I looked away, hoping that my lack of a follow-up would make clear that I wasn't interested in socializing. The smile didn't falter but I blocked out the one-sided conversation, staring ahead at nothing at all, sipping my way to shitfaced. 

When I was twelve I was hit with the unmistakable sign of being a woman. I tore apart the bathroom searching for something to help, something to stop me from ruining my pants, from becoming too much, from overflowing. I was babysitting, the oldest in the house at the time and suddenly, apparently, a woman. 

Words had always been my savior and so I scribbled out a note to pass to my mom when she got home: a note confessing my womanhood. I couldn’t say the words out loud. If I did, it would make the moment real. It would make my body real and I would be standing before her as nothing more than flesh and bone and blood. So much blood.

And so, I passed her the note.

My mom had probably long forgotten that moment, the moment her daughter stood before her, cheeks stained with tears and embarrassment. Perhaps she had forgotten, but I never could. I couldn’t understand why I was unable to say the words, why I had to write it down, why I suddenly felt betrayed by my body. It certainly explained the way my jeans felt tight around my hips and why I had to go bra shopping with my mom. But the explanation felt like an excuse. None of my friends had gotten their period. But there I was. Bleeding and aching and growing. 

Unacceptable. 

Thirteen. Bouche missed me, he said, could we spend time together? I shrugged. I had too much time left on this Earth but I didn't have the energy to decide what to do with it. He'd had a few drinks, perhaps too many. I didn't live far, did I? He knew the answer before the question left his mouth. Could he maybe sleep on the couch? His eyes waited to meet mine, hoping for an answer I didn't want to give.

I didn't know how I felt about the prospect of his sleeping in my apartment though his voice softened when he promised me that nothing would happen. I closed my eyes tightly, willing my brain to shut the fuck up as I pushed out the vague memory of a night we shared years before. He had been sober while I was left with bits and pieces of memory, my intoxicated brain unable to process and record my own actions. When I woke up on the floor the next morning, clothes haphazardly covering my skin, my stomach sank as I realized. I knew what it meant, legally speaking, and so did he. I tried my best not to look my friends in the eye when we joined them for breakfast that morning. I tried to ignore their smirks and their questions, the accusatory glares. They had seen us sneak away and I told them it was nothing, pass the bacon. He inserted himself into the conversation, making comments that stung and slapped me awake. What kind of a man, he wondered out loud, would take advantage of a girl who could barely stand? Everyone agreed that the idea was unthinkable so I bit my tongue and tucked the fractured memories away. That night was kept between only the two of us, settling heavy in the space left between our bodies. 

Fourteen. Kyle was a kind soul and one of my brother's closest friends. We practically grew up together. It took him years to confess what I had figured out by age 

fifteen. I knew the glances over dinner, the jokes told directly to me across the table. The lingering gaze when no one else was around. He had dinner with my family often and he didn’t notice when I slipped away after, while my parents and siblings and Kyle laughed over more jokes I never got to hear. They laughed while I choked and coughed and emptied myself, flushed away every little thing that felt wrong. I tried and tried to flush away his gaze, the way his eyes burned into my skin, the way it felt wrong and I felt wrong but nothing made it feel right. 

Just before my twentieth birthday, Kyle confessed what I had figured out long before. He loved me, he said. He wanted me. He took me out to dinner and we laughed over candlelight before he whispered the words and invited me back to his place. In the morning, I tiptoed into the bathroom and avoided my reflection. I hoped he didn’t hear me leave. I left him on read and avoided his calls and hadn’t noticed when he arrived at the party, when he spotted me from across the room. 

Sixteen. Kyle joined Bouche and I and I wondered if either of them could tell. I had never experienced such a strange interaction, sandwiched between two men who both knew my body intimately. More alcohol. I needed more alcohol. 

The room began to empty, filled with a silent pressure to leave. I didn't know what argument to make when both men asked to spend the night at my apartment. It was just down the street, and they had probably drunk too much to drive. What kind of a friend would I be if I refused?

By the time I was seventeen, what had started as a bad habit had become an uncontrollable behavior. Each day at school, I counted the hours I could go without eating, waiting anxiously to go home so I could play the sick game I had made up. I knew on some level that it wasn’t a game. I knew it was actually a problem. I wasn’t stupid; they covered that stuff in health class. I just told myself it was a habit—a secret I could keep—a game I could play. 

I usually had about 45 minutes to myself after school. Forty-five minutes to raid the pantry, empty cabinets, shovel the sweet, sweet ice cream into my mouth. It was still cold as it climbed its way back up my throat. I could ignore the sharp pains in the center of my chest, the way my eyes became surrounded by broken blood vessels, the metallic taste of blood that I threw up sometimes. I could ignore everything that ached because the game was my escape. It was meant to be a sometimes thing. Until it became my everything.

Eighteen. As I unlocked my apartment door, Kyle and Bouche spoke to each other quickly, deciding who would have the honor of lying next to me. It was Bouche, the man who promised he wouldn't try anything because he really just wanted to sleep and I empathized with him so much because sleep was all I wanted myself. A dreamless sleep. An endless sleep. Darkness. Nothingness. The End. 

I couldn’t decide if I had always been this way, always longing for the darkness in the distance, the unreachable end, the comfort of deciding for myself. Sometimes I’d try to remember when the noise in my mind first appeared. I found old journals once, from middle school. I had written about boys, insults hissed in the hallways, clothes that started to tighten and squeeze. I had written a note. I was a child gripped by sadness that wouldn’t let go and I tried so hard to keep it confined to my journal. A bright green journal covered in stickers, filled with hearts and dreams and wants. And a note. 

I tried to get help once, not long after I turned nineteen. I sniffled and sobbed to a stranger, confessed my sins, recounted the way I had come to pray to a porcelain god I wasn’t sure I believed in anyway. I uttered the words and made them real and labels became part of my existence. Bulimia, they told me; they knew that for sure. Depression, definitely. My parents longed to know what had caused it all, but their pleas were only ever met with silence. Silence and shame that weighed me down no matter how hard I tried to make myself lighter. The labels hung heavy on my shoulders and I decided I was better. I smiled and took the pills they gave me and promised I was The Best Patient anyone could ask for and they had made me better. I never told my doctors that at night, I wrote and rewrote my note. 

Twenty. Bouche guided me to my bedroom, dropped me off in the doorway, and shuffled off to the bathroom. He'd be right back, he promised. I watched him close the door behind him and quickly found myself on the floor. I had drunk too much. I always drank too much; all that I was and ever could be was far too fucking much.

The bottle became heavy in my hand. I had counted them just days before. 

Twenty-one. I smiled as I placed the pill on my tongue. Twenty-one pills: one for each year of my life. It felt poetic. It felt right. 

It felt insufficient. 

Only months before I had watched as a stretcher was rushed down the hallway in the hospital where I worked. As a CNA, I wasn't included in the action, but I rushed to join a quiet huddle of nurses as they recounted the events. Fourteen milligrams, they said. Fourteen milligrams of a benzodiazepine needed to calm the patient rolling by me, on her way to the ICU. Fourteen milligrams that earned her intubation. Her weight could support the heavy dose that somehow still didn't control her urge to swing at staff, trying to fight the sedation about to overtake her. 

Fourteen milligrams. Twenty-one pills. 

There were twenty-eight left.

Time began to blur and swallow me whole. Suddenly Bouche was sitting next to me, looking at me with that stupid smile and gentle eyes. 

"What's this?" he asked, reaching for the bottle in my hand, fingers wrapped around the plastic tightly. My eyelids felt heavy as he pulled it from my grasp. 

"No," I protested but he wouldn’t give it back. Instead, he took me by the shoulders, guided my head to my pillow, tucked the edges of my blanket around me, leaned over me, and turned off the light. 

Everything felt hazy. I closed my eyes and fell into a dreamless sleep, an empty reprieve that I had hoped would be permanent. I never heard him leave the next day. I never heard the knock on my door, my roommate asking if I was okay. I never heard her walk away with a sigh. I never heard the panic in the voice of a friend who figured it out, who called the police and my dad and begged them to hurry. I only ever heard the silence that settled in the space between me and my dad as he drove me to the emergency room, afraid to ask me what went wrong.

I tried to die on a Thursday but woke up on Saturday, dragged to the emergency room by loving arms. I withdrew from the pills on Sunday and the nurse on the psych unit offered me something to ease the tremors. I went back to bed instead. After seven days, it was determined that I was no longer a danger to myself. I told the doctors I was fine, it was nothing more than a drunken impulsive mistake. After all, I reminded them, 

I hadn’t even written a note.