A Reason To Live

A man contemplating ending his life takes a look back with a photo album to find a reason to stay alive.

This is it..." My heart pounded. "The finale, the climax, the end." Every pore on my body was sweating. I put the barrel to my temple and put my finger on the trigger. "Five, Four, Three.." I began to tremble, my entire body shook as if the earth was falling apart under me. "Two..." I squeezed my eyes shut tight, and than... I put the gun down. "Damn it!" I cried.
"I just can't bring myself to do it."  I let my body fall back on the bed and covered my face with my hands. "I just wish I knew why, it's not like there was any reason for me to live!"
I sighed, flipped on my side, and opened the family photo album I had planned to look at before I, well, sealed the deal with a bullet if you catch my drift, but I just couldn't bring myself to do that either. On  the inside of the cover it read "These loving memories belong to Mark, Sasha, and Ethan." I'm Mark Hamilton, Sasha's my wife, and Ethan's my kid. I love them both to death, but I just can't support them. I just got laid off from my job and I can't find anywhere to work. Ethans only three, can hardly walk and only speaks a few words, so he doesn't understand why daddy cant buy him little toys and candy anymore, and Sasha just tells me to be optimistic, that things will get better. I wish I could follow her advice.  On the next page are our wedding photos. I wish I could go back to those times. It was all happy. Nothing went wrong, we just lived and good things happened. I had a great job as a doctor, and Sasha, well she got to do what she wanted from all the money we had. We moved into a two story house, nothing fancy, we just wanted to live a normal life, and a normal wife we lead, the only difference was we had slightly nicer things than the average middle class family. Sasha had her jewelry, and we had bigger TVs, just the little things in life, or some might even say big these days. Those were the days, and than I got the mal-practice law suit filed against me. After performing heart surgery on a man for blockage, I gave him a pre-scription, and he went on his merry way. Soon I find out his blockage is back, and I ask him if he had been taking his medicine. Turns out he says I never told him to get the pre-scription I gave him filled, so he took me to court, and won. Now no hospital wants me working for them, and I lost almost all of my money. Seems like life just likes to knock you on your a*s after it gets you standing up straight and proud. Flipping through more pages it was just pictures of me and Sara, on our honey moon, on a vacation, and around our house. Than came my parents funeral pictures. Those brought a tear to my eye. My father had been a smoker since he was a teenager. I'd been trying to get him to stop for awhile, and when he finally said he would I was over joyed. Well, one night he decided to sneak a smoke in his main bathroom. My mom woke up and told him to come back to bed, the lucky b*****d didn't even get caught by her, so he tossed his cigaret out a window he had opened to let the smoke out. Well right below the window was their stock of fire wood. The cigaret was lit and caught the wood on fire. Their house went up in a blaze and they went down with it. The photos showed pictures of their funeral, of our car trip there, and other sad memories. I skipped over most of that part, everything but a picture of me with my parents when I was a young boy. My dad had one hand and my shoulder and the other around my mother, who had both her arms over me. I felt a tear come to my eye, and it fell on the picture. I wiped it off and flipped the page, no use for a grown man crying. On the way back from my parents funeral Sasha began to feel sick, and she told me she had missed her period. Turns out she was pregnant. The next pages have pictures of her at different times of her pregnancy, and than we have baby Ethan. We raised out cute little baby boy just fine until a little before his third birthday, thats when I got the boot from my job. The last picture in the album was a picture similar to the one of me and my parents, except it was my family. After a few sentimental moments of staring at it I closed the album and picked up my gun again. I sat up on the side of the bed and just stared at the side of it. I knew my reason to live now, a reason to wake up, to keep going. Than I heard the front door open and I knew Sasha and Ethan were home, so I slid the gun under the bed. Ethan ran into the master bedroom, where I was, and thrust a book into my hands. "Daddy, momma bought me book!" he cried excitedly. I put on a soft smile and lifted him up onto my lap. "Read Daddy, read!" I hugged him tightly and told him "I'm sure mommy would like to read this with us." She must have heard me because she walked in and sat down with us. I opened up the book and began to read, I read to the people I loved, to my family. My reason to live was right by my side, and I wouldn't do a thing to take them away.

Author's Note

Anything I should have gone into more detail on?

Reviews

[J.L Hunter]

For one thing. I love paragraphs. What I've learned is that most publishers look at a story with few paragraphs with daunting trepidation. It's kind of like a strait-shot road rather than one with many curves. The one with curves sometimes take longer to travel, but is most of the time much more interesting. Putting that aside, I thought the piece was altogether solid. Although I seriously don't think you need to worry about detail as much as you do style. Read it over yourself and you'll see what I mean.

[Mark D. Chevalier]

I think you covered the detail of the story just fine. I was able to get a firm grasp of what the issue was, and the reasons for why he felt at first as if he needed to do himself in.
Keep up the good work.
M