Staggered Steps

Dearly devoted suicide, surrounded by the millions of the silent, the ignorant, the biased and deplorable. To jump into the river, to save a drowning friend, to sacrifice yourself. To add another complex variable into the function of life - to pull from the darkness one that fears the light. To pull a fireman from a burning building, to spare a life at the cost of lives. Felix culpa, my blessed homicide.


We stumble, we stall, we trip and we fall. Life tangles by our feet like the worst of nets, hindering us and delaying us.

Who am I?

If life has shown me anything recently, it's that I'm sorry I'm broken.

But this is who I am. This is what I am. And because of that, I live in a nightmare that's far more complicated than anyone would ever understand. You can try to pierce the shell, but I armor myself with strangeness - dealing with it isn't ever easy, even for myself.

Kiss a needle, or hold a cactus - the closer you get, the more I push back. I'm sorry. It's not really my intention to hurt, but the natural reaction born from a life of distrust. Humans make me sick, so is it any wonder that physical contact makes me flinch? That any words spoken are taken as lies, sprung from a paranoid mind? That 'normality' seems so far away that it's not worth reaching for?

Being me is never, ever easy. Despite how much you may think you know me, no one has even scratched the surface. If you think you know who I am, think again. It may be more befitting to you to assume you know nothing about me, and maybe you'd be closer to the truth. Until you've walked down the road I've been on, and tasted the blood of hundreds of lives on your hands, please don't assume things about me.

You mention love and happiness, but my life has been a stream of negative emotion. I'm devoted to others, but never to myself, and I may never be. These are foreign concepts to me, and although I've encountered them now and again, there are some things that just can't be fixed. Consider the fact that these things make me who I am, and maybe I don't want to change. Please don't guilt me, it's always something hard to do, but it needed to be done. Struggling through things while life gets worse is never a sure bet, and telling the truth is always harder than whispering lies.

No, I'm not normal, but I never claimed to be. No, I won't be alright, I may never be. No, I'm not ready for this, and I tried; but life hardly works like this. Maybe in the future, maybe never, but time will tell. I'm just broken... and I don't know if I want to be fixed.

This wasn't how it was supposed to be.

I sat down on the grey carpet. There was a round stain from the coffee mug that had sat there for days. It would probably never come out.

He was sleeping, but that was okay. He slept a lot lately, and I reached out to run my fingers over his stomach, like I used to when I was a kid. But instead of the normal shirt and jeans, the soft fabric of a hospital gown met my fingers. It was cold, and I wondered why they would make something so important so fragile.

The only noise through the silence was a short beeping from the corner of the room, monitoring his vital signs. The steady pulse of the machine resonated with my heartbeat, and at times I felt as if the two were one - my own pulse keeping him tied down to this world.

The rosary in my other hand felt as cold as ice. I used to think it was strange that people would only turn to God when they needed a crutch. I eventually realized that people turn away from God because they can't bear to trust in anyone but themselves.

Even though it was a bright day outside, we kept the shades down. The darkness in the room was almost like a sound, a scream of silence that deafened the mind. We hid the light, because being blind to it was better than being taunted by it. The true horror wasn't in the darkness - it was seeing the light but not being able to feel it.

I wondered how it would feel like to be trapped in bed; staring up at the blank ceiling all day, trying to discern patterns in the chipped paint. When faced with a blank slate, the mind tends to wander - but the end result may not always be what we expect.

My fingers found his hand and held it gently. He was so fragile, but he wasn't supposed to be.