You wanna know my life story? I'm kinda fuzzy on the details myself. But the highlights? Those stick with you. They're the anchors that drag you down.
It started with a sound. The sound of a door slamming, but not the angry kind. The final kind. The kind that echoes in a too-quiet house after your dad's car has already peeled out of the driveway for the last time. I was nine.
I didn't understand the word "affair," but I understood the hollow look in my dad's eyes when he found mom's phone. I understood that the foundation of your world can just… crack, and nobody asks if you're okay standing on it.
After that, the house was just… quieter. Emptier. Mom tried, I guess. But she was living in her own world of guilt and whispered phone calls. I became part of the furniture. The strange kid.
Then came high school. Strange kids are targets. It's not like the movies. Nobody shoves you into lockers with a witty one-liner. It's subtler. It's colder. It's the group chat you're not in, suddenly going silent when you walk by. It's your lunch "accidentally" getting knocked off the table for the third time that week.
It's the nickname—"Leith the Teeth" because I had a dumb overbite back then—that follows you like a smell.
I tried to fight back the only way I knew how. Jokes. Being the clown. I'd make a fool of myself just to get a laugh, hoping it would make them see me as a person, not a punching bag. Sometimes it worked. Mostly, it just gave them better material.
"Look at Leith, he's so pathetic he's trying to be funny."
You can't win.
The worst part wasn't the bullies. It was the silence at home. The empty chair where my dad used to sit. The way my mom would look at me sometimes, like I was just another reminder of the life she blew up.
The weight of it just… keeps piling up. Every day, another pound of dirt on the coffin. You stop feeling angry. You just feel tired. So unbelievably tired.
The day I did it, it wasn't some dramatic, screaming cry for help. It was quiet. It was a Tuesday. I'd gotten a C on a math test I'd actually studied for. Someone had posted a picture of me, mid-sneeze, in the group chat. The messages were rolling in. "LOL" "ugly" "delete this."
It was so stupid. So insignificant. But it was the last pound of dirt. The coffin lid clicked shut.
I remember the feeling of the pills in my hand. Little white escape pods. I remember swallowing them one by one with tap water that tasted like metal. I remember lying on my bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling I'd put up when I was seven. I thought about my dad. I wondered if he'd even hear about it.
Then… nothing.
Waking up was the opposite of nothing.
It was a cold so deep it felt like my bones were made of ice. It was the smell of damp ash and something sweetly rotten. I wasn't in my bed.
I was on my knees on a shore of fine, grey sand that stretched out in every direction into a sick, yellowish fog. A cold, silent sea of the same grey water lapped at the sand. The air was thick and heavy, pressing down on me.
This wasn't my room. This wasn't a hospital.
This was… nowhere.
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through the haze in my head. I scrambled to my feet, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"Hello?!"
My voice sounded small and pathetic, swallowed by the fog.
"Is anyone there?!"
Nothing. No answer. Just the endless, silent grey.
This had to be a dream. A nightmare. I started to run. I had to get out. I had to wake up.
I ran along the shore, my feet sinking into the cold sand. The fog didn't clear. The landscape didn't change. It was just more grey sand, more grey water, more suffocating silence.
This was wrong. This was all wrong.
I fell to my knees again, the panic curdling into something worse. Something absolute.
This wasn't a dream.
The last thing I remembered was the taste of tap water and the plastic bottle of pills.
The truth hit me with the force of a physical blow.
I wasn't waking up.
I'd never wake up.