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There’s nothing for you, anymore. You burnt all your bridges, knowing always that it’d end like this. You quit your job and sold off everything, sent the family heirlooms back to your mom because “you didn’t want them to get lost in the move.” And in a way, you weren’t lying. A move from living to dying, a move from suffering to emptiness.
There’s just one more thing you have to do, one more preparation to make to make sure that you can exit calmly.
You don’t want anyone to be sad. You don’t want them to remember you like this, or at all. So you’re going to tear down your house. But not you yourself-- that would take too much time. You want to be gone now. You walk down to the mayor’s office to put in an order of demolition, smiling gently to yourself because your sentence is almost over.
Isabelle is smiling when you walk in the door, and a realization hits you like a train. Isabelle still cares about you. Isabelle might be the only one who still cares about you—and it’s not like you’re special, she cares about everyone—but she still does care. You swallow hard and keep on getting closer, gritting yourself and praying she won’t ask any questions.
“H-hey, Isabelle… Um, I need to put in an order of demolition, f-for my house.” You’re shaking and you feel like you might barf, like you might barf onto Isabelle and maybe that’d be better because then she’d hate you too, not the way you hate yourself but it’ll do all the same.
“Okay, I’ll just put in the order to destroy your house--- WAIT, WHAT?! Are you sure about this?! Think about everything you have in this town!” She cries out, lisping and looking worried.
“Isabelle, please calm down… I don’t have anything left in this town. Please, don’t make a big deal about it… just put in the request to tear it down…” You say, shaking your head, you can’t look at her, tears welling up in her little eyes and you feel pinpricks white hot like a thousand suns in your eyes too.
“Wait… Please, please be honest with me. Are you going to kill yourself?” She asks, sharp inhale of breath and she’s crying, hard.
“Isabelle, sssshhh, it’s okay. I- I’m not gonna kill myself. I’m just, ah, moving. And I don’t want the town to be stuck with my old house.” You move as if you’re scratching an itch on your back, but all you’re doing is crossing your fingers tight.
“Really?” Isabelle asks, using her little paws to wipe her eyes.
“Really, Isabelle, that’s all.” You smile, and it feels hollow but it also feels so good knowing that she’s off your back.
“Where are you going to be staying before you move?”
“The campground. As soon as my tickets come in and my house is demolished, I’ll be heading out.”
Isabelle nods, and puts in the request like you ask. One step closer to completion, you feel so free, like you could just jump a little and be lifted into the night sky.
You’re walking around the town, taking in the last few bits of it you liked before you off yourself. You write a cute little message on the board, saying that even though you made some enemies the past few weeks you’ll still miss everyone in your new home. As you round out your little stroll, you notice that your house is finally, finally gone.
You try to go calmly back to the campground but you’re too giddy to walk right. Skipping, you make it to the space, and hurry inside. In your knapsack by the sleeping bag are pills—all sorts of pills. Your pills, pills you scooped up by the handful at some of the parties that Chrissy and Pietro and all your other used-to-be, seedy-underbelly friends used to invite you to, pills you quietly stole from bathroom medicine cabinets when you visited Deidre and Chevre. A baggie full, like candy, and your eyes light up with the realization that you are about to die.
You decide you want to take it slow at first. You pull out a bottle of water from the knapsack and open up the baggie, taking one or two at a time at first, washing them down and trying to imagine how nice it’ll be when you’re dead, how quiet and still. You start to up the ante, taking in five at a time and that’s when the nightmares start, Pietro’s face cut and lording over you and you hear people screaming but you don’t know the hell who. You start shoveling the pills in trying to get it over with trying to drown it all out but nothing stops.
“Hey, are you in there?” You hear from outside your tent, all at once booming but a million miles away. “I’m gonna come in, is that okay?” It’s Isabelle, you think, but everything is fuzzy and sharp, out of focus and in and it’s a nightmare funhouse. The flaps on the tent shake like an earthquake and then there she is, huge and changing colors a little you think you don’t remember.
You just keep trying to swallow as many pills as you can.
“What are you doing?” Isabelle asks, eyes wide and she holds paws over her mouth. “Y—you are trying to kill yourself, aren’t you?”
You look at her, trying to get your eyes to focus in on her face but you can’t control it anymore.
All you know is that there’s a catastrophe of movement, and someone is crying for an ambulance or a doctor or something, you think it’s Isabelle on her phone, and everything is going in and out and all around and your stomach hurts so bad.
Your head is in her lap and she’s stroking your hair trying to keep you calm and her tears are falling on your face.
You think you get your stomach pumped and a stay in the local mental health center.
But you also think you might be dead and this is just a different form of afterlife.
Sometimes you hope that this self-destructive fire within you will be extinguished and you can get on with being someone worth being.
But sometimes all you want to be is destroyed.