She didn’t plan to make a scene. To be the object of everyone’s confusion and amusement.
She just planned to make it stop.
It was Tuesday. Midterms and early mid-life crises attacked her like dirty laundry and her brain wouldn’t shut up. So she took the pills. Most of them. Maybe all of them.
A swallow, then a pause. But “what now?”
Then she called her best friend. Ashamed and terrified.
Because even when you want to die, you don’t really want to die alone.
That’s the kind of loneliness she couldn’t bear to stomach. She always felt alone, but the thought of being picked right on up out of life like one bad apple in a bunch was daunting.
Time seemed to stop as she laid there. Tears streaming. Non-stop.
Moments later, the police showed up.
Thirty minutes later, she was being hauled out on a stretch like an overdramatic extra in a Tubi movie.
She didn’t know who saw what. Who knew.
She didn’t ask, but she could feel the weight of all those dorm windows and faces watching.
The whispering.
The “Oh my God, did you see…?”
She wanted to scream.
The mental facility wasn’t a facility. It was a waiting room for people too tired to die, but to broken to heal.
She was “admitted” (insert: trapped) for seven days. No counselor. No talking.
Just everyone taking pills.
Pills in the morning. Pills at night.
Pills to stabilize her enough to sign the discharge papers.
She swallowed them because what else was she going to do?
Complain?
They just wrote her refusal in their clipboard of “patient still refusing and ungrateful, keep her another day.”
When she left, life didn’t roll out a red carpet of second chances.
There was no “welcome back” party, no epiphany. Turns out, attempting suicide is just like college group projects. Everyone watches, no one really helps.
She was still drowning. But now with slightly less energy, and still no will to live.
People thought she was better.
She let them.
It was easier to smile than explain that you’re still standing in the fire, just quieter now.
That night, back in her dorm, she sat on her bed and stared at the ceiling.
It was quiet.
Too quiet. Not even her raging thoughts were loud.
She whispered a prayer. Not because she believes, but because she had nothing else ot lose.
“God…if You’re there, just give me a reason not to do this again.”
She didn’t hear a voice.
She didn’t feel a miracle.
But she did wake the next day. And the next.
And maybe, for now, that counted as enough.
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