On a cold winter day

For L.J.
      The worse thing about thinking that you can't stand another minute, is that you know you will have to. You can rage against all the choices that led you to this point, this place where you can't find the ground to stand, but you learned a long time ago that rage is useless. You will endure, you will swallow your rage and all those things you want to say, because that's what you have to do.
      You listen to the songs on the radio on your bed at night. Sometimes you hear the one that speaks to you. You say, that's my life, and memorize the words. You buy or download the song and play it over and over until it loses the hold it had on your soul. But you find yourself muttering it under your breath at odd times. People occasionally hear you. It doesn't enhance you in our eyes. You already have a reputation for being odd.
      Their condescension and ridicule makes you defiantly do other odd things. They whisper that you're only looking for attention, not understanding that you wish the earth would swallow you whole. You hate yourself.
      You hate them, too. You hate their lives. You hate their friends. You hate their achievements. You hate them all, but if they talk to you, you find yourself snapping to attention like a lap dog. You'll run their errands, you'll laugh at their jokes, you abase yourself for that attention. You hate yourself even more for that.
      You can't endure the quiet. You have to have noise. The TV is always playing or the radio or your MP3 player. You need something, anything to drown out the hum of your thoughts. You remember reading that Poe story about the ever-beating heart; your thoughts are like that.
      Even though you try, you can't recall how it started. When was the first time? When did you realize that the blades let out your pain? Maybe you were just fooling around. Maybe you read somewhere that other kids did it. Who knows? That was many years and many scars ago.
      You have a good life, you tell yourself. You have a good job and many friends, some of whom are close, but you don't tell them your secret. You don't let them see behind your mask. Sometimes you have to lie to keep that mask secure. Sometimes you have to drop a friend who asks too questions or who gets too close. And you don't have lovers any more. Besides, how could they compete with that gleaming edge, that one friend who has never left you alone?
      So you spend years alone, just you and the knife, walking an edge that no one knew you did. Perhaps you thought you could live that way forever. Maybe you knew that you couldn't.
      It was a cold winter day. You were tired. You were sitting in front of the living room window after a hard day at work. Your friend cut too deep. An accident. You watched the blood for a while until your head swam and your vision darkened. But then you decided you wanted to live.
      In a way, it was funny. All those years you had thought you'd rather be dead, but now you realized you wanted to live. Ironic in a terrible way. You made it to the phone.
      Of course, there were counselors and changes and all sorts of lies that were exposed. You lost some of your friends; they couldn't deal with your issues and weren't truly friends at all. Others held onto you too close. You were different. You had decided to live and be more than what you had been, and that was hard on your friends and harder on your family.
      Finally, who you are now couldn't fit into the place that you had made for yourself here. So you moved across the country. Found a great job and a man to love and now you're living the life you never dared to dream. I get Christmas cards from you, and we talk every now and then. But the calls get shorter because we've both have different lives now and that's hard to share over a phone line.
      I'm sad for that, but happy for you. On cold winter days like today, when I look out the sliding glass doors across my brown lawn to the barren trees beyond, I think about you out there in the world. And in my mind, you laugh as you walk in the bright sunlight.