I still didn’t know why Emery leaving with Emily bothered me as much as it did, even after I’d dressed and climbed into bed for the night. I turned on the TV despite the uncomfortable pain in my stomach, trying my best to ignore it as I flipped through the channels.
Finally settling on an old Lifetime movie, I pulled the fluffy white comforter up under my chin with a sigh, feeling marginally better now that I was clean and warm. Emery’s journal was right where I’d left it earlier, and I peeked over at it, eyeing it like it was a giant bowl of pasta and I was on a no-carb diet.
“No, Cooper. Don’t even think about it.”
I spoke the words out loud, as if that would stop me, like Kalo would hear them and prevent me from grabbing the damn book even if I wanted to.
The air conditioning kicked on and I adjusted the comforter over my shoulders again, watching as the main actress in the Lifetime movie grabbed a knife off her kitchen counter, dropping to the floor with wide, terrified eyes. The man she’d once dated was crazy now, and he’d just broken into the house.
My eyes flicked to the journal and back again.
The actress screamed. He’d found her.
Kalo’s leg twitched with her dream and I reached for her, soothing the fur on her belly, eyes skirting off the screen again and back to the bedside table.
“Whatever,” I huffed, flipping the covers back and grabbing the journal off the desk. I looked around me, like there were cameras ready to catch me in the act. But it was just me. He was with Emily, I reminded myself.
And then I cracked open the leather binding, flipping to the third entry.
Marni is disappointed in me.
That’s my therapist’s name — Marni. I told her Grams gave me this journal three weeks ago, and she was excited I was finally going to give writing a chance.
Since then, I’ve only written two entries.
And so, Marni is disappointed in me.
I told her to join the club.
Today was a bad day. She knew it when I walked into her office and didn’t crack a joke or ask about her cat. I just sat down in the same chair as always and waited for her to ask how I was, to ask how I’d been. And when she did, I just said I was fine. Everything was fine.
Marni knew it was bullshit.
She wants me to write about that day. She thinks not acknowledging it is holding me back and preventing me from moving forward. She said writing about it will be easier than talking about it, because writing is free of judgement, writing is just for me to see and to think about.
I still think all of this is fucking stupid, but I’m tired of adding people to the list of those I disappoint, so here’s my attempt to write about it.
There was a break in the page, a little star between the two paragraphs, and my throat was tight as I continued reading. It was there in my stomach before I even read the next word, the knowledge that what I was about to see would change everything.
I just took a nap. Even thinking about writing about that day exhausts me. Even now, after sleeping half the afternoon away, I’m still just so… tired.
That day feels like a dream.
It’s been almost two months now, and it feels like forever ago and like it was just this morning. It feels like it was someone else and like it was me, too. It feels like I dreamed it and like it happened and I’m no longer here, even though I am.
There was nothing particularly shitty about that day. It was just another bad day, another day where everything felt pointless. I was a month away from graduating college, with a degree I could take or leave, a degree I got because it’s what was expected of me. I had a lot of people who called me a friend, but not a single one of them knew a thing about me aside from my name and what kind of beer I drank. There was a girl in my bed that morning, and I barely remembered the night with her. Her name was stitched onto the little backpack she had with her and her tits were fake. That’s all I knew about her when she left that morning, telling me to call her, knowing that I wouldn’t.
I remember lying there, not blinking, just staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to go into the kitchen and have to make small talk with my roommate or go to my capstone class at one-thirty or meet the guys from my fraternity out at the bar that night. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to live.
That’s how easily the thought hit me.
I was just sifting through everything that sounded awful in my mind and the sheer pointlessness of it all steered me right to that simple truth: I didn’t want to live.
I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t tick through any of the reasons why I needed to live, why I should want to. I just thought it, and then I walked into the bathroom I shared with my roommate, opened the medicine cabinet, and grabbed the bottle of hydrocodone he was prescribed after his oral surgery earlier that month. He’d only used a few of them, and there were six left in the bottle.
I took them all.
Marni wants me to write about how I felt after I swallowed the pills. She wants me to write about what was running through my mind as my breaths got shallower, as the light slowly faded away, as I closed my eyes for what I thought would be the last time.
But Marni doesn’t get it.
I didn’t feel a single damn thing. I didn’t feel sad, or angry, or scared. I didn’t feel relief, either. I didn’t wonder what people would say or do when they found me. I didn’t think about how it would break my mom’s heart. I should have thought all of those things, but I didn’t.
The last thing I remember thinking was that living was exhausting.
And then I closed my eyes.
My lips quivered as my fingers traced the ink on the page, the cursive lines that made up that last sentence, and then a tear fell from where it had trickled down my cheek and splatted on the page.
I turned to the next one.
When I woke up, for a split second, I thought maybe I was wrong about religion. Everything was white and blinding, but it was because I was in the hospital. I hadn’t taken enough. They pumped my stomach and I woke up. I lived.
So, there it is. I wrote about it. Assignment completed.
Marni said after I finish I should let it digest and write about how I feel tomorrow, after I’ve let it sit for a day.
It’ll probably be another three weeks before I write in this thing again.
The date on the next page was the day after the one I’d just read, but I couldn’t read anymore. My eyes were blurred by tears I held onto as I closed the journal and held it to my chest. I felt so dirty for reading that entry, for being selfish enough to want to keep reading even when I knew it was private, when I knew it was something never meant to be read — least of all by me.
He’d tried to kill himself.
My heart squeezed and I closed my eyes, letting the tears fall halfway down before I swiped at them, and then I tossed the journal back on the bedside table like it was on fire. Flicking off the lamp and the television, I rolled over to face the window, hugging a pillow to my chest.
I couldn’t hold onto a single thought before another one raced into my mind next, quickly replacing the first. Who had found him? Who told his parents? What happened next? Why did he do it? Was he seeing Marni before that day, or was she part of his treatment plan? Was he on medication now? Was he okay now?