The Tormented Mind of a Wisdom-Craving Teenage Spinster

My friend wants to kill herself, and I don’t know what to do. My friend almost ran away from my home last night while I was sleeping. I don’t know what she was going to do. She sent me a text message at five o clock this morning, to ask if I could open the front door for her. I came down the stairs like a ghost. On the porch she stood, cold, pale in the darkness of the black night. ‘What are you doing? Where did you go?’ I asked her, ‘I am alone’, she answered. ‘I am never alone, and now I am.’

I don’t know what to do.

I have no idea what to say. And helplessness is drowning me. When I need help, I would usually get it from her. I’m a good listener. They’ve always told me, but she needs words to be said to her now. She needs encouragement, and I don’t know what to say. She wants to be free, to do as she pleases, to get insanely drunk and not care, maybe to pass out from use of drugs. She was my ally against that whole world. It was me and her against the rest of the stupid, wild and unfulfilled body of teenagers. We would watch movies together, and eat popcorn and have fun, while talking about what we wanted to do when we were older. She doesn’t know who she is now; let alone who she wants to be when she’s older.

How can I be who she wants me to be? How can I comfort her when all she wants is for people to be unkind to her? She wants to get angry, she says. ‘I want to go and yell at my mother.’ ‘What has she done to deserve that’, I thought later. What have you done to deserve this frame of mind? She was good all her life, ‘The perfect child,’ she scoffed last night. ‘I’m through’ she says, ‘I don’t care’, so she decides to throw her life away. She wanted to be a doctor. Not anymore.

I can’t even begin to understand what she is feeling. She won’t even cry. ‘I’ve cried all of my tears, and they are not worth to be spent on stupid thoughts of a silly little girl’, there she was again, scoffing at the world. She doesn’t understand the world, she says, I agree with her, not knowing what else there is to say. I scream at myself for being so stupid. ‘Say something’, my mind screams at me. But I just don’t know. I don’t know.

She is feeling more pain and confusion than I could ever imagine. When I felt pain, I would inflict it upon myself, so as not to hurt anyone else. But she doesn’t care, and now that she has left my home and gone to hers, I am thinking up great things to say. I’m always too late, never on time for anything. What does she want? And why can’t she see that the world has given her a life and that that life is blessed? Blessed with so much love and friendship that anyone else’s heart should surely burst from it. I tell her that that girl had problems and no one could see it, ‘It is not your fault that she died! You hear me? It is not your fault!’ She smiles sadly and says, ‘But I looked out for everyone else except for her. She was the only one I overlooked. So, maybe you can understand why I feel it is my fault.’

I sit there stunned, shocked to my very core. She was gone. The cheerful person I had once known was dead. Drowned in grief is the most likely cause of death. But it’s not grief is it? No. Self pity and sorrow is more alike. I begin to feel the rage inside of me. I begin to want to go down to her home beside to beach and scream and yell and punch her until she gets angry at me. She wants to get angry then, get angry at me. Why not, I am selfish, unfeeling bitch. Perfect. I would goad at her to punch me. To hit me, kick me scratch me, anything. Just to make her feel the passion, the overwhelming emotion of anger. Maybe I am not important enough, for her to get angry at, but I could still try.

But no, I stay here, and type this nonsense in the grey light of my Saturday morning. Recording what I hope will soon be just a time in the past when the future did not seem as bright. A time when I promised myself that today would be for me. I would have had a happy day, I think; if she had not come to me with her tormented mind. But do I regret her coming? I do not think so. I am glad, and angry that this should happen to her; glad because this was a long time coming, and angry because she does not deserve this.

‘I want to kill myself, I just want to end everything.’ she said last night. I wasn’t fazed because all teenagers go through that time in their life. I believe that almost every soul longs for the end at some point, and most of us are too scared to do it. Too scared to see what it will inflict on other people. I know I was.

One of the things that had me worried the most was that she never cried. Not one solitary tear. My mom says that I should not be afraid of that; she’s probably already cried herself out into oblivion and back. And I was not there, no I was probably too busy worrying about a stupid test I had this week or this stupid English essay that I had to write. Sometimes I can’t understand why bad things happen to good people. And why good things happen to bad people, ‘That’s the way things are’, my mother says. My mother says a lot of things. Sometimes I don’t believe her. I don’t want to believe her but I know that I must, if I want to have a good outlook on this unsafe and hostile world.

And if this world is going to eat me alive at some point in the future, I want to be ready for it. But that is not possible. Death can come at any moment and most of the people who do die, may not deserve it. Does that mean that they have fulfilled their purpose in life? Does that mean that God has seen fit for them to come home? I don’t know what to think any more. Sometimes it is just easier to believe in something, in anything. Sometimes it gives you a meaning for your life. And sometimes you just live a lie.

I can feel my heart pumping the life around my body. And I know that she can too. It’s a strange feeling, knowing that you’re alive while wishing you were dead. Early this morning, I could almost feel her shadow pass through my room. My dreams were restless, and when I heard the front door I hoped that I was still dreaming. I wonder does she even know what her action would have done. How everyone would have reacted, how I would have felt. No, I don’t think she thought at all.

There is so much that I would like to say to her. So much that I hope I can communicate to her before she does anything stupid. I just hope that I’ll be in time, this time. I really do.