Chapter the First

Whoever said dying was the coward’s way out had no idea what they are talking about. Yes, it may just be me doing this horribly, terribly selfish act, but you don’t know what it’s like to be at the end of your rope, frayed and tired and so, so scared. I’m scared of dying, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to try.

Living is terrifying, and death is just the same. You don’t know what true mortality is until you’ve tied that rope around your neck and are standing on the edge of the chair, waiting for it to tip over. That is not the coward’s way out. You must have more bravery to take that final step than it does to convince yourself that living isn’t too hard… yet. Someone still needs you. You need you to live. You want to see one more snow. You want to see the girl you love’s smile light up the room once more, over the fact that something you’ve said made her day. You want to have laughter. You want to smile. You want so desperately to be happy but don’t know how. You want all this, want it more than anything, but can’t because you know that it means that you’ll have to live one more day in a world you hate.  Somewhere, in the darkest, deepest reaches of your heart, you want to live. You want to live so badly, but you can’t because you’re too tired. You can’t stand it any longer. So, you take that one little step forward, and let gravity do all the rest.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, however you look at it, I haven’t let gravity take me. We’ve danced, but he’s never successfully taken me with him. I blame her. The girl. My girl. The one who loves me, she who loves me back. She is my reason. I know it’s a bad reason, if she learns to hate me, I’ll spiral out of depression and straight into death’s waiting arms.  Even if it is the worst reason, I can’t help myself. She is my soulmate. My other half. She is my everything when I have nothing. I can’t fathom life without her, and I pray to god she sees it that way too. The one I love, my Amaya, is like me. She thinks the way I do, feels the same things that I do too on a regular basis.

Amaya, she is the sweetest angel, at least, the sweetest one I’ve ever seen with broken wings. She was born and made to fly, but life threw her from the sky, and she landed in an explosion of feathers. She can no longer soar above the clouds, and fears the skies that stole her wings away. My angel is beautiful, but she is broken. I want to see her overcome her fears and become one with the sky again. I don’t want her to be like me, I want her to be happy and as light as air and pure. That’s the way she was made to be, she was made to be happy. She wasn’t made to be like me.

But, as the way she is right now, she is exactly like me. Depressed and anxious and afraid of the world and everything in it. She has to remind herself every single day that life is still worth living. Nobody cares about what we feel- her parents are busy and so they never notice, the schools never care so long as we’re not bringing their ranking down with bad grades, and because we only have each other, we have no one to lean on when we get this way. We’ve talked about lover’s suicide, running away, death, our fears. Everything. Who we’ve loved. How we feel invisible… that all we are is just a statistic, be it in life or after we die. We’ve realized early on that we don’t matter to anybody but each other. Nobody ever matters unless you’re there to help make somebody else’s life better.

This is not the way she’s meant to be. She is meant to be successful and happy. She is as close as perfect gets, outside of her panic attacks. But perfection is not her ideal, it’s her parents. Perfection weighs in on you like a bag of bricks, suffocating you until you crack. And Amaya is on the verge of shattering.