Most people will never truly understand depression. They cannot fathom someone replaying suicide in their heads over and over again. And for that, they are lucky. They are lucky that they will never know that kind of hurt. But I am not so lucky. Before my awakening of maturity, I was left with a shattered array of teenage years. Ones that battled suicide over and over again. The scars on my arms from cutting are a reminder of the girl I was growing up. She was so beautiful, but she had no idea. Self-expressive, different, undeniably uncomfortable in her own skin. She went at war with eating disorders, experimented in one too many promiscuous activities, and was diagnosed a chronological liar at only 15 years of age. When she grabbed the kitchen knife and threatened to kill herself (the note, already written in her bedroom) I wish I could have been there. Not to pull the knife away, but to get to her before she even reached that kitchen drawer. To stop her. To drag her, crying with bloody wrists, to the bathroom mirror. And then to cry, leaning over the bathtub in pain from the sobs, and cry with her. Let her bawl her eyes out, choking on heaves that were too heavy to swallow. She needed that. Someone to break down with her. To let her know that those demons that came to her, came to others too. She never knew. She never knew that other people fell as deeply dark as she did. And that loneliness shadowed the happiness of her life. It stripped her of her childhood, forced her to runaway to Alaska, and made her into I am today. I don't regret those years. I wish, for her sake, that she wouldn't have gone through them. But without them, she never would have grown into a storyteller (rather than a liar). And she never would have found her fate.
