Rest In Peace My Angel

         Suicide….this is a word that has haunted my presence since the 8th grade. It was a word that I thought of daily. I never thought of it because I wanted to, nor because I felt I wanted to do it. This word was on my mind because of a very different reason, a reason that scarred my life.

         April 2nd, 2008 is a date I will never forget. I was sitting at lunch over at Columbia Junior High School, fresh out of my 4th period English class. I had a strange feeling in my stomach, but I ignored it and went to enjoy the company of my friends. My friends and I were messing around, laughing and having a great time. Unfortunately, as they say, all good things must come to an end.
         It had been about two years since I had seen or heard from my best-friend who I swore I was in love with, David Chitwood. I always thought about him constantly, hoping he was doing well in California and missing him with all my heart. So that day I was surprised when my phone got an incoming call from California. My heart leapt with joy thinking that somehow it could be him. I answered the phone and that’s when my entire world came crashing down around me. It was David’s mother on the other end of the phone and I could hear in her voice she had been crying. “Hello, is this Lani?” she asked politely, I said yes it was me and that’s when she broke down crying; explaining to me that my number had been in David’s phone and she felt obligated to tell everyone the truth: The night before her and her husband had gone out on a dinner date, leaving David to himself. They came home late that night, around 11:30 and as they walked in they could sense that something was wrong, the house was too quiet. They thought David was asleep, so his mom went to say goodnight. What she found was a horrid sight. David had killed himself. He had found his father’s gun and shot himself in the head.

         I could not believe what I was hearing. I knew David had been depressed; I had tried saving him from his depression all through 7th grade. I was in love with that boy. I couldn’t believe he was gone. He was just gone. All hopes of ever being with him again were taken from me for no real reason. And what had hurt me the most was that he never got to know how I felt. I never had the chance to tell him.
I stopped breathing in that moment. I didn’t know how to react. I thanked his mom for telling me and got off the phone. In that second, I walked over to my friend Connor and just broke down crying. I couldn’t stop. My friends Eddie and Autumn came over to help and Autumn walked me to Mrs. Thomas’ class. Everyone had known how I felt about David, they read the poems I wrote for him, they heard how I talked about him, it was no secret and they all had to painfully watch this tragedy rip my life apart.

         The months that followed I wasn’t the same. I ate less, slept more, stopped doing school work, stopped talking to people and hanging out with friends. I was so depressed that on weekends I wouldn’t even get out of bed, I started missing more and more school, using any excuse I could to stay home. I went through a stage where all I wanted to do was die and be with David. I tried doing other things to ease my pain, but nothing really helped. The only thing that I felt truly helped was cutting. It became a habit, a way of dealing with anything that triggered pain, an addiction even.

         My parents got me into therapy, three separate times. In therapy I just pretended to be okay and pretended like I was getting better until they said that I didn’t need it anymore. I was still secretly cutting and wanting to die every day. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and given antidepressants as well as Lithium, for mood-stabilizing. I stopped taking all those though. They didn’t help, they just made me feel fake and like I couldn’t feel how I wanted to anymore. Somewhere along the way I had fallen in love with my sadness, thinking that pain was the only way to know that I was still alive, if I didn’t feel pain and I couldn’t feel happiness then I was numb, and numbness meant I wasn’t alive. I didn’t like feeling like that so I just stopped taking my pills. My parents tried fighting with me about it at first. My mom gave me my pills on a schedule and would watch me take them…in the beginning. She had to work though and so soon I was left in charge of my pills, or my dad was, but he never really paid attention to what I did or didn’t do/take. He still doesn’t, he’s always hiding away in his office “working”. So it was easy enough to just hide the pills in my room and pretend I was taking them. When my mom went through my room one day though and found all of them she realized what I had been doing and that there wasn’t anything more she could really do to make me take them. So she let me stop, I was getting better and dealing with my mood swings anyways. The cutting still continued though. All throughout my 8th grade year and half of my 9th grade year I kept cutting.

         My friends tried to help; they would slap the cuts if they saw them to shock me into stopping, they would cry to me and beg me to stop, they would talk to me, but they really just had no idea what I was going through. I wouldn’t let anyone in. Not my friends, parents, therapists, teachers. No one could get through to me. I was wrapped in my own dark little hole and just wanted to stay there until I died.

         Halfway through my 9th grade year however, when I walked into CJH, it seemed like everyone considered me as just the “emo” girl; the one who cries all the time, the one that’s always depressed, the one that no one can help. Everyone had really just given up on me and stopped caring. I can’t blame them though; I was just sucking the life out of everyone around me like David’s death had done to me. No one could handle me anymore. I was a very dark, depressed being. I blamed everyone for everything that went wrong in my life and took every little thing that happened and made it a life or death situation. People couldn’t handle my constant threats of suicide and cutting, wondering if I was going to show up at school the next day or be dead, and freaking out in constant panic if I didn’t show up to school. I don’t know how many times I would be gone for one or two days then when I came back hear like 10 different people say, “Oh my God you’re alive!” or “You’re not dead! I was so worried!” Slowly those comments stopped though, the trying stopped and the overall caring kind of ceased to exist. I wasn’t surprised, but it still hurt. I still remember what my friend Connor said to me on the one year anniversary date since David’s death. We were in science class and I was talking to my friend Brianna about what day it was and he overheard and he just said, “It’s been a year Lani, get over it”. At first I thought it was the meanest thing anyone could say, but Connor had been there through it all. He was the one who I fell upon crying the day I found out at lunch, he was the one who had sat in math class with me every day in 8th grade trying to convince me to stay alive another day and hearing everything about me wanting to die day in and day out. So I realized that when he said it, it meant that officially everyone was done with me talking about everything. Between him and the only counselor that ever understood me and actually helped me, Mr. Clergy, that’s when I decided that he was right.

         It still took quite a while for me to actually change. The day I officially decided I had to quit all the shit I was doing; the cutting, the suicide talk, everything; was a day I won’t forget either. I had decided to stop partly due to what Connor had said, partly due to all the help that Mr. Clergy had provided for me, but mostly because the day before I decided to stop I had gone into the bathroom and I was very upset; God knows the reason why; but I sat down and made nearly 200 cuts on just my right arm alone, another 50 on my left probably. Some were deep and some were shallow, but all of them bled and I almost died that day. I had panicked though, I grabbed a towel and wrapped up my arms and held them above my head to slow the bleeding until they stopped bleeding all together luckily. The next day at school by 6th period though I had managed to forget about my arms and what I had done. I took off my jacket and was wearing a short sleeve shirt, I didn’t even notice my barely scabbed over scars either, but I did notice that kids near me were giving me weird, shocked, scared faces for some reason. Then my best friend at that time, Christian; who I also had a huge crush on and who meant a lot to me that year; passed me a note, which was a daily part of what we did in that class. On the note he asked me if I was ok, I replied with “yeah, I’m fine, why?” and then all he said was “your arm”. I then remembered, looked down and I saw how bad my arms really looked, they were scary. So I put back on my jacket and assured Christian that I was ok. He then grabbed my hand and looked directly at me and sincerely asked me to stop cutting and that he was genuinely concerned. Christian and I have such a long history together that anyone who knew us wasn’t surprised in the slightest when I never cut myself again from that day forward. When I had seen my arms and Christian’s face; especially since he used to cut as well; I knew that I couldn’t go on with how I was living. As one of my old heroes, WiL Francis said: I had to get busy living or get busy dying, there was no in between for me anymore. I was done with people expecting me to be depressed all the time. I wanted my friends back. I wanted people to care about me again without thinking I’m just over-dramatic. I wanted to be accepted in high school, not the one loner kid that has no friends. So from the end of 9th grade on I worked hard to change my outlook on life. I changed my clothing style and started wearing more colors. I started smiling more. And eventually the pain of David grew dull. I started to move on and being ok with life.

         It’s been over two years now since his death. I still miss the happy times we had together; the times where we would sit and talk and laugh and for a moment, just a moment, he would forget all his problems. I still remember the first second we met. I still remember every moment we shared together and every conversation we had. I still remember his eyes, his hair, his smile and his smell; sometimes all too well. I still cry and wonder what could’ve been sometimes. And I still believe in my heart that he was my true love. I don’t think that I won’t love again, but I doubt that I’ll ever love that deeply and truly again. I have realized though, that life really doesn’t wait for anyone, and I was tired of letting mine pass me by. I know David wouldn’t have wanted me to suffer the way he did. And I know he’s happy where he is. I will always love David, and hope that my angel is resting in peace, even if my heart is resting in pieces. David changed my life in many ways and I will always cherish his memory and friendship. His death was a huge struggle for me and taught me a lot, but I have grown up since then and become stronger. I no longer blame myself and have accepted that my life is meant to go on; even if that means without him. I know I’ll see him again one day.

         My main intent on sharing my story with you, however, isn’t so people know about my life or how I felt about David. It is so that everyone who’s going through this kind of pain or darkness knows that there is a way out. You’re not alone, ever. If you need someone to talk to I am always a good listener, but please just try to remember that suicide is not the way out. It can cause someone you love and care about to go through tremendous pain without you ever meaning to cause that. No one deserves to feel like their only way out is death, because it’s not. Everyone is meant to be alive for a reason, no matter what, so please never feel that you’re alone in this world…