Side Notes to a Suicide Letter

December 29, 2006

December 29, 2006, seems like a good day to start writing an autobiography. Maybe not an autobiography, but at least a summary of the last year of my life. I don’t really expect anybody to read this, except perhaps a lawyer or maybe a forensic investigator looking for the events leading up to my suicide. Maybe I’ll keep it as a side note for my suicide letter, who knows. I keep my suicide letter on this piece of trash so somebody’s going to wind up going through this machine’s hardive and discovering all my dark, dirty secrets, I might as well write something of vaugue importance. So we have this; a reflection of my last few monthes at Bishop Caroll high school and the period of mourning for my soul after that. I might as well stop writing the foreword and get on with it.

Down once more to the dungeon of my black dispare, down we plunge to the prison of my mind, down that path into darkness deep as pain.

It started around when I met Claire. No, in reality it had started long before that, perhaps when I was born, perhaps when I started elementary school or started high school. Perhaps it started when I realised what I was, or when I fell for a certain blue haired beauty. Perhaps it never really began, it just always was. But for the sake of convinience and easier reading I’ll start when I met Claire.
My short ‘affair’ with Jill had ended. We were never really anything more than a romantic friendship, our relationship dissolved when she moved to Lethbridge to attend university. I don’t think there were any ill feelings between us; I don’t really talk to her anymore so I don’t really know. I’m sure she’s more interested in women her own age than this mediocre high school student she embraced once upon a time. But I feel I should thank her nontheless, she help me realise what I am: a lesbian. I feel no shame in saying what I am, if it wern’t for my parents I’d sport a rainbow on my backpack and and an ‘I love Lesbians’ patch on my binder. I only withhold the information from them because if they knew it would restrict my social life, and those all girl sleepovers would stop. And my girlfriend would shoot me, I’d be dragging her out of the closet with me and she’s not quite ready for that. But My Girfriend will be mentioned later in greater detail.
I spent my grade ten year going to Bishop Caroll High school, which was both my best and worst year of school so far. While I had many friends, a good social life and no bullies with which to deal, I suffered academically. At the end of that year I left Caroll with barely ten credits to my name. But I don’t regret that because everything I am, my perspectives, my opinions, my appearance, my feelings and my mind, I owe to that one year. While at Caroll I met many people, many of them helped me shape who I am, and for that I am ever greatful. Among them are three of the most important people in my life: Nicole Fletcher, Ashley (Vash) Alto, and Claire Hamel.
To each of them I owe a lot, they taught me more about about life and myself than even my parents.
Nicole was the Artist, finding beauty in everything around us, Vangough re-incarnate if you will. She became my confidant, the one who I could tell anything and who would say what needed to be said. We were both self-mutilationist, cutters, directing our aggression and anger at the world inward, taking solace in the blood that ran from our abused bodies. We understood each other, and even when we didn’t we listened. She is one of the few people who keep me alive, but one day things will change and she won’t be there to stay the knife, or keep the rope from around my neck. All things change in time.
Vash was the singer and actress. She was my polar opposite, the yin to my yang. She was as blonde, bouncy and spontanious as I was dark, grim and depressing. In any other story she would be a hero. She was both the court jester, able to bring a smile to anyone’s face, and the king’s champion, doing what was right but not always easy. She seemed to be made of DDR, Japanese animation, jpop songs, rent, smiles and spontanious laughter, all packaged up as a short, charismatic, busty, blone girl. She introduced me to the joys of japanese vidoe games, skipping school to go to the mall, broadway musicals, toga parties, slacking in stairwells, singing at train stations, sneaking into bars and collabrative yaoi fanfiction writing. She made me realise that even though I was failing I could still be happy. Hero though she would be in most stories, she is only a supporting role in the tale of my life. She is the reason I write, especially fanfiction.
But the one who plays center stage is Claire. Whether she’s the heroine, villain, or just another supporting role, I won’t know until this tale’s done and I’m dead by my own hand. She was the embodiment of true innocence even though she was almost eighteen. She had slightly curly midnight colored hair and a smattering of freckles, a tendancy to wear rediculous jean overalls and a light black trenchcoat. As I said before, she was nearly eighteen but acted and looked like some eleven year-old pastor’s kid. Goddamned blue jumper suits and duo braids. She was a religious fanatic though, a right wing, born again Christian activist, obsessive about Jesus, God and the church. We often joked that she was the true second coming described in revelations, and that I was the devil coming to tempt her; I was a gothique Lucifarian afterall.
The three of us spent a lot of time together and became very close, But Claire and I often seperated ourselves from the others and spent extended amounts of time only in the company of each other. We did many things: we collaborativley drew centering on original characters, we talked of many things, we even wrote a few times. But the most important thing we ever did together was sing. Claire allowed me to reach the full range of my voice, it could shift from the lament of an ancient celtic ballad to the passionate anger and overwhelming hatred of a gothique rage beat in her presence. She let me do things with my voice that I fear I may never be able to do again. But as Claire and I sang together more and more I came to a slow realization, the understanding that I had real feelings for this young woman. We sang together, always building off one another, entwining our voices so that they became one, and in that moment my soul shone with joy. It was ecstasy to me, but it was as satisfying to me as the drug that shares its name. We sang many songs, but the one things we sang that meant the most to me was Andrew Weber’s ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ We each had our parts; as she was Miss Christine Daée, I was Erik, the Phantom. We would throw ourselves into the musical, letting ourselves become those charactors, doing every gesture and expressing every emotion. I cried more than once while acting out Erik’s sad fate with Claire. I knew I loved Claire and it haunted me, the idea that one day I would have to tell her, but I deluded myself with the high I got from being around her. I had a fantasy that I shared with no one, one where I told Claire how I felt and she acccepted and returned my love with as much passion and devotion as I held for her, but it was only a fantasy. My delusions had to end one day, and they did, too soon in my eyes though. Claire was like a drug, I was in agony without her, and slowly it became torture to be near her and have her so oblivious to the feelings that were tearing me apart on the inside. I finally broke down and confessed how I felt. I cried. I don’t cry, it’s in my nature to bleed and avoid crying at all costs, Claire will never know what I gave to her that day. I could see the disgust in her eyes, but it was her ‘christian duty’ to try to convert me to the ways of her God when I was at my weakest point. She told me Christ cried for my sins and that he would embrace me in heaven if I repented my sins. I told her that tears did nothing, and in my heart I know it to be true. At that point in time I promptly walked away only to return the day after and pretend nothing had ever happened, Claire was more than happy to comply with this plan. But the torture became worse, her every touch burned my flesh and I felt as if this feeling in me, this feeling that made me ache for her, crave here flesh against mine, this feeling I was born wth, this feeling which denied me entrance into heaven, that it would rend me apart, limb by bloody limb. I tried ignoring the feeling, refusing to acknowledge it but with little avail. It was always there right beneath the surface, ready to emerge at any inoppurtune time and play games with me. I became depressed and horribly suicidal, trying to figure out the best way to take my life and not affect those around me. I tried to cut the feelings out, hoping to bleed away this emotion and all the thoughts, urges and implications that went with it. I tried to hate Claire and blame her for the way I felt, but I just couldn’t. It wasn’t her fault that I felt this way, she had led me on, returning my hugs and even occasionally cuddling with me, but I’m sure she just thought I was a very physically friendly person.
Time went on and I began to pour my soul out to Nicole more, finding the peace and quite of the girl’s change room a good place to talk with her. We spent hours at a time in there, exchanging thoughts and feelings, angsting at each other over the world and our fates.
I began hating myself more each day, loathing all I was. Near the end of the school year I came to the conclusion that it was better for everbody, especially Claire, to hate me and see the evil, corrupted thing I had become, rather than pity the mask I had put up to the hide from the world. I’m not entirly sure how I managed to accomplish it but she began to hate me. She still put up the impression that we were still friends, but I could feel her revulsion splashing on my skin like a dirty rain. That was the last time we saw eachother under the pretences that we were friends.
When the summer began we started excanging e-mail, hiding our real feelings from each other in pleasant typed words. Claire had gone to Quebec to live with her father for the summer. We talked about the differences between here and there, movies, books we had read, normal everyday things. I still hated what I was and had decided to see if it was just a phase I was going through by dating a guy. I wound up dating Vash’s twenty-year-old brother Brad by chance. He seemed to be pretty into me but I felt nothing for him. I figured if anybody could turn me straight it would be him, but it wasn’t meant to be. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday I met my soon to be girlfriends, Mallory, Mali for short. I had met Mali at Vash’s birthday party the previous November but remembered nothing of her but a random dare from the game we had played. She went up to a random guy, hugged him, said ‘I love you sparky,’ then proceeded to run back to the saftey of the group and giggle with the rest of us. Around me she was a small, shy girl that blushed every time I hugged or complimented her. She doesn’t play a major role until later in the story. But things with Brad died after about a month when I realised that it was going nowhere. It wasn’t that he wasn’t man enough, he was too much of a man, I feel I should thank him, he taught me a lot and he was a really nice guy.
I decided that if I gave my feelings for Claire time that maybe they would go away. Occasionally time does not make us wiser, and absense makes the heart grow fonder, or more twisted in my case. As each day went on I realised I’d made a mistake in making her hate me, for I couldn’t bear the fact I continued to live while I had hurt Claire. The thought drove me to insanity and I became truly convinced that I should die by my own hand. Perhaps there really is a reason that gay and lesbian youths have a much higher suicide rate than those of ‘normal’ teens.
By the end the summer I was like a druggy in withdrawl, I was craving my drug with an insatiable lust. In those two short monthes I had become a completely different person, I had embraced the darkness in my soul and had nurtured it into a large part of myself. I had accepted that I loved those of my own gender and began to try and drown those feelings for Claire in the arms of others. I let myself be overun with the shadows, sinking deeper into my addiction, taking up the knife once again. I took comfort in the blood that ran from veins and the pain that lanced through my body as I dragged the blade across my skin on a routine basis. I often cut so deeply that I would pass out and wake up hours later, alone in my room with blood covering my body and pooled around the floor near me. No one ever found out what I had done. Claire had commited the perfect crime, killing somebody without ever staining her hands or reputation; I was the one they blamed. Suicide looked more appealing every day. I had Written up my letter and was waiting for the perfect moment, where I would be left alone in the house for a while so I could end it all in solitude with no one there to stand in my way. My plan was to break every mirror in the house, set my computer up in the bathroom displaying my letter on the screen and my music playing in the background. I would take a shard of the broken mirror and slit my wrists with it, draining my body of its essesce and allowing the blood to flow down the bathtub’s drain. I’m still waiting for the perfect oppurtunity.
Just before school began Claire’s letters stopped without an explanation. It seemed she had come to accept her hatred just I had come to terms with my darkness. Once again my depression took over and I wanted to die. I had given up everything for Claire, and even if she couldn’t love me, all I wanted were her acceptance, friendship and forgivness; I couldn’t live without her. I had given up my chance to find real love in the world by devoting myself entirley to her. Given up the love of my parents, they would probably toss me out if they found out who I was, what I loved. Given up my eternal soul, uncaring if I was damned for all eternity for loving her. I gave up everything dear to me for her, and she couldn’t even look at me, let alone forgive me. I lived for her and she looked through me. Death was the only solution in my mind. I called Nicole and informed her of the decision I had made. Nicole couldn’t understand but she managed to talk me out of it, how she did I’m not sure. It had something to do with a beautiful story about a frog in a jar. I wasn’t physically dead, but inside I was a corpse, empty and numb.
I started grade eleven at Bishop Grandon in that state of mind. I knew almost no one there except Mali, but I didn’t care. I attended my first classes in a trance and barely managed make a decent imprssion on my teachers and the other students. I was in all grade ten courses so I was seen as a failure by the faculty, my fellow pupils and by my own eyes.
At the end of first term I found myself to be scraping high seventies in all my classes, not because I did any of the work but because I knew it all from the previous year. I also wound up dating Mali, because I was mildly attracted to her and because she intruiged me. Mali had so much more substance than I did and I wondered how she could like somebody as empty and transparent as me. She mystified me because at first glance she seemed timid, but beneath that first glance she was anything but shy and weak willed.
Second term began and I gave up. I no longer tried to keep up the charade that I was paying attention in class, prefering to spend my time doodling in the back of my binder. I took to cutting in class since none of the teachers seemed to notice and none of my classmates would tell for fear of the ‘dead girl’s’ wrath. I had made a name for myself in the school; by being an unfeeling freak who didn’t care what others thought of me, I allowed others to call me what they would. I walked through the cafateria and people inched away from me, the girls because they were afraid they might get raped by this ‘dirty fucking bull dyke’, and they boys because if I sliced myself up without flinching what could I do to them? I earned those names by hitting on any passing girl that caught my fancy and by drinking my own blood in class. One Girl, her name was Sarrah or something, had the audacity to inform the science teacher of my ‘messy aggresion’ while I was feeling light headed from blood loss in class. I got dragged off to the counciler’s office and interogated. They checked my arms and legs for cuts, and when they found them I managed to convince them into thinking they were nothing but cat scratches. Nontheless, I was dragged down to the councillers office many times for indecent conduct, violence, suicidal ‘expresssions,’ and overall issues. I was hauled down therre so often they seriously considered expelling me over it.
Every time that happened Mali would hold me and ask me why. I told her all about Claire and my time of mourning for myself. She would get this sad beautiful look on her face and only hold me tighter. I began to truly love her for her devotion and depth of emotion, because in her I saw myself as I had been almost a year ago. I can’t use the word innocent because I was never innocent, I was tainted when I was born, but Mali had the innocence I never had. I couldn’t help but begin to return her love and find some solace in her arms. She gave me all she was willingly and I accepted and revered it, for she was a goddess by her own right. The only things I ever regret about loving her are the facts that my filthy, corrupted hands were the ones that caressed her body when she could do better, that when I let my dirty body become one with hers I took a part of her that could never be given back, and that she made me break my promise to myself; the promise that I would never love again. I love her enough to stop cutting. I truly love her, though it may be different than what I had for Claire, but I will always love her, whatever she chooses, forever.
My mother and I use to be very close, sharing smiles and inside jokes but things changed very rapidly. My Mother started dating someone and our connection, bond, whatever you want to call it, slowly fell apart. We grew distant and gradually began not to talk or see eachother. My mother frequently spent more nights at her boyfriend’s house than at home, and it got to a point where I only saw her once a week. I started hating her for abandoning me, knowing in my heart that she never really wanted me. Afterall She and my Father had wanted an abortion, and that is as unwanted as it comes. Nontheless, blind to the way I felt as, everyone seemed to be, she had the nerve to pull me aside one day and ask me if there was something wrong. This had been going on for more than a year before my mother clued in, not realising that she had been a large contributer to my recent heartache. She gave up trying to reform our relationship after one try (although that was more than my father had ever done) and sent me off to see the family doctor. The doctor informed me that I was severly depressed and that the only way I could ever be normal again was to take drugs. As I listened to this I could help the idea that my mother had pushed for the drugs because she didn’t like the person I had become. At least my mother wanted to try and make everything better, but my Father would have no part in it. The arrogant prick didn’t even consider coming to a meeting with the doctor because my mother had neglected to inform him of the fact that she had taken me to see the doctor. He finally showed up at the threat of legal action, but only grudginly because he wasn’t the one in control. The thing you need to understand about my father is that he is a control freak, you would only understand if you lived with him, but I’ll try to explain in a way you will hopefully understand. He never saw me as a person after my mother divorced him, he saw me only as an object, a part of my mother as well as a sufficient weopon to enact revenge upon her. He would try to control me and convince me to hold more contempt for her than I held for him. He never suceeded but only increase my burning hatred for him and everything he ever stood for, and I hate more than I hate anything else in this world, with the possible exception of myself. But time went on as it has a tendency to do.
It was swiftly approaching the end of the second term and I cut in class almost daily then, for regardless of Mali’s healing soul and the doctor’s diagnosis I was an addict, more hateful then ever and caught in a prison of disdain for myself and the world I myself had created. It took a while but one of the teachers finally clued in and noticed the pools of blood periodicaly situated around my desk. Once more I was dragged to the councillers office and interrogated. I didn’t care anymore and finally told them what they had always suspected. They called my mother and told her what she already knew. She guilt tripped when I mention my growing hate for her and took me out for a night on the town, confirming my suspicions that she had begun trying, like my father, to buy me out, to superficially fix our “family” with little more than the emotional equivilent of scoth tape. They were nothing more than ackward moments and worthless baubles, they had been blinded by the side effects of an empty society that had been created by a world of comprised of lies, greed and violence, they had been deceived into beleiving that useless junk and one night could fix things.
Thrid term began and I finally advanced to grade eleven courses, knowing almost no body in my 20 courses. They were fairly harder than the grade ten courses but I could still get away with barely paying attention and not doing the work. I still cut in class but the school councillors were getting smarter, and no longer taking my word at what they were. They decided that the best course of action would be to call my parents, who then called the doctor and phsycologist who advised them to have me institutionalized at the hospital. I was taken to the hospital, where I spent a stressful nine hours in the waiting room. It wasn’t stressful because of the fact that I had been dragged away, or even the fact that I was in a waiting room, it was stressful because both of my parents were there and I could feel the rising tension. I had specifically asked the councillor not to call my father because I knew he would make a scene, and I wasn’t dissapointed. My parents started a fistfight in the middle of the room and I didn’t do anything to stop it. The security gaurds rushed in and tried to hold them back, while, for some strange reason, I was sedated. The doctor then tried to question me, but I was too sedated to answer his questions, so I was deemed to ‘distressed’ to be of any use and was sent home with my father because he was least injured, not because he was in a sane state of mind.
In the next few days the reactions to the news of my institutionalization got around the school and even the teachers began to avoid me. They thought I was a psychopath, suicidal, homicidal and on the edge. I walked through the hallways between classes and it was like Moses passing through the red sea, people parted before me and silence fell across the masses as if they had been gagged. It made going to classes easier but made things awkward and a little embaressing, but it was good. The masses now feared me, and fear was power.
I went to grad with my friend Chisholme that year, as a friend and for a fun time. She appeared on the dance floor, my haunting angel, clad in a flowing balck dress, the corest top emphasizing her bosom, the color reinforcing the paleness of her skin and the midnight shade of her hair. She looked like what she was to me, an angel of death. I felt that familiar sensation, her disgust washing over me, the dirty water being willed to infect all my coarse, open wounds. I met her gaze once that night, dancing and trying to forget everything in the movement of my body to the music. I only wish I could have lost myself to the music. Our eyes met and I saw the one thing I had longed for all my life: Curiosity and just a touch of lust in those liquid chocolate eyes. I’d always been able to read her like a book, and when I saw that I knew… I knew I wasn’t just imagining things all these years. She felt something, even if she didn’t know or didn’t want to know. But I knew and it made me crazy. I tried to talk to her, to apologize, but she refused to acknowledge my existence, she couldn’t even meet my eyes. I still wonder if she knew what I saw, but then I remember that it doesn’t matter, because even if she did know it wouldn’t make a difference.
About a week after that I tried to kill myself again and again I failed and they locked me up. I was in there until my birthday and I walked away with the intent of trying again, until I got it right.
Nothing important happened until November, when Mali and I broke up. I had dragged her down into my pit of despair and I was destroying her one day at a time, her spirit being crushed because I still loved Claire. So I left her, knowing I was killing a small part of both of us.
I tried again, more failure and more institutionalization. Sometimes I think that God enjoys playing this cruel joke on me, letting me fall so far and not giving me a way out, He must enjoy my pain to toy with me for this long. You think He’d have better things to do.
When I was in hospital this time some one came to visit me. My friend Brianna, whom I hadn’t been that close to until I broke up with Mali. I’m not sure what happened, if it was real feeling or just pity on her part, but we became lovers of a sort. She was so much like Claire in attitude; she had the whimsy, the religious devotion and the sparkle of innocence. This went on until about April when she told me I made her feel like a bad catholic and that she was sorry for leading me on. It hurt so much to hear these words, not because of the ending they meant, but rather the ignorance of action they implied. She knew all too well what she was doing, the fact that she would deny this mad me so angry. I hate getting dumped for jesus.
At easter me mother, who I had moved in with full time, kicked me out of the house, forcing me to move in with my hated father. It wasn’t so bad though, he was absent for months at a time so I had my solitude, time to think and all that.

I sat huddled under the covers of my bed that night, my comforter pulled up over my head in an attempt to block out the world. My life was flashing through my head, all the miserable attempts at life and love, and their equally miserable failures. As these images danced in my head, teasing and tormenting me. I knew I had to do it, I had to die and soon…
So I wait…

And here I am, watching for the right time to die, just a little bit of time alone with a knife and I’ll be free and Claire will win. So the most significant parts of my life have been summarized into seven pages of drivel that I’ll leave as a side note to my suicide letter. The people in my life never realized how truly blind they were, be it Claire, My mother and Father, or even myself. No one ever wondered if maybe it were he or she who created a person like me, or perhaps the society they created fashioned who I am. No one ever stopped to think about it, but in the end it never mattered, I’m just another junky who took her life because of unrequited love and a troubled home, nothing more.