• Hi. I’m Zane. I’m just your average guy; Short, black hair, that I spike as often as possible, because I worry about my appearance as much as the next person. I’ve got green eyes that I hide behind a pair of run of the mill glasses, and I’ve been told that my build is nothing to really speak of. I’m not fat- not obese by far, but I’m not built like those models you see in the fashion magazines either. So I guess that I’m just a so-so kind of guy, you know, the kind that people just pass over when they see me, because there is always someone better to look at. Something more interesting.
    I don’t wear any of those, well, major name brand clothes. They just don’t... seem to fit right. And I’ve never felt any inclination to dress up in a suit every day just to please the people around me. So jeans and a t-shirt. That’s about what my wardrobe consists of, again, nothing special.
    There’s never really been anything special about me, but… Events have happened to lead me to actually have a story to tell. A story that I believe will never be heard, but if I write it down, maybe it will go away. Maybe I’ll forget. Everything that happened, and everything that went about to cause it.
    It was in my first year of college that it happened. That thing that would change my life forever. Things started to happen within the first week of my college life, when I overheard something that I probably shouldn’t have. Something negative about me, and about the people that I was prone to hanging around with.
    They, my former high school classmates, seemed to be in awe over the fact that I still was with my friends from high school. They seemed to think that I only spent time with these people because it made me look even better by social standards. Because they had something worse than me to compare me to. Now, I will admit that my friends had never been the most ‘good looking’ bunch by ‘popular’ standards, but I felt the need to defend my choices for being with them. Yeah, it made me feel good, but for different reasons than these people seemed to think. These people, these friends of mine, were good natured, caring, and people that I could turn to and depend on. This was my belief, and it was very much what I wanted to keep believing.
    Then the one who had started the conversation was interrupted by the one of the others, and that person went on to say that there was nothing better about my friends either. That they were perhaps worse, by using me to try and make themselves look better. Because they were hanging around with someone who was perceived to be as ‘cool’ as me, they were elevated on the social status ladder. According to this person, my friends were worthless for going along with my vain reasons for hanging out with them.
    I know that I shouldn’t have been listening, and at first, I kind of just shrugged it all off. It could never, ever be true. We were really good friends, all of us. So these people, who spoke as if they knew everything, didn’t know anything at all. And should be ignored because what other people think shouldn’t matter at all.
    But I couldn’t get it out of my head. I just kept thinking about it, and thinking about it, until I hit my first psychology class. Then I became paranoid. The professor told us, on the very first day, about the nature versus nurture theory- in part anyway. He explained the nature theory to us, and about how we do things that are in our natures as human beings whether it is subconsciously or consciously. We look for shelter by buying homes, and we look for out potential mates based on whether or not they look as though they can reproduce well.
    And that we all try to make ourselves look better in the eyes of society, because it is society that decides whether we live or die. And natural selection won’t allow us to do anything less than think of survival above all else. This… Well, it hit home, and my paranoia began, as I began to fill with self doubt, and doubt directed towards the people around me. I couldn’t look at anyone the same as I had before, and I became temperamental to a point of driving everyone away from me.
    I began to seek out new friends and companions, because I couldn’t stand the thought of doing something so cruel to the people around me. Even if they were doing the same to me, which is what I had started to believe. We had so much fun, and were always laughing, and having a good time… Yet I believed what those people who had been around me in high school said. I had based my analysis on an incomplete psychology course and lesson.
    I had changed.
    Before long, I had come to start hanging out with homosexuals. Probably because I didn’t want to be around my former female friends, thinking that I might start looking at them like meat. Reproductive meat. That could be used to further my bloodline, and to make children for me. I figured if I decided to be around the lesbians, bisexuals and gays, everyone would assume that I was one of them too. Maybe they would all leave me alone and stop thinking about me that same way. Stop seeing me as a sexual organ that would provide sperm to the sperm bank, and make babies for all the girls.
    Unfortunately, this plan backfired. I started to have… strange feelings towards the homosexuals of my own gender, one in particular whom I had started to see as a close friend. And it confused me even more. At this point, I was hiding out in my room, holding my head and crying. Yes, I, the guy, was crying. I couldn’t take it anymore. What was I thinking, trying to stay away from the proper heterosexual relationships that made us all human? That helped our human nature to exist? I was straight gods dammit! I shouldn’t have been seeing these people that way! I should have… I should have run. I should just leave. They didn’t want me around anyway. They were just using me for the same reason that the others had.
    Except for them, I was the straight friend to bring home to mummy and daddy. To make mummy and daddy happy, because their kid wasn’t entirely gay, they could make some nice straight friends. Who might even be able to help them fix themselves and become normal again. So that these kids weren’t ‘sick’ anymore, as if they had some kind of disease. But I began to think like their parents, believing that this disease was contagious. That I was catching it as I continued to speak to these people. Because I had never, ever, been the type to look at another guy and be like ‘Damn, he’s got a nice a**. I wouldn’t mind doing him…’
    But now I was. And I blamed it on them.
    Psychology classes continued, and I continued to psychoanalyze myself consistently, finding something wrong with me on every level, in every chapter. When we went on about homosexuality being either nature or nurture, I looked back in my past to try and find something that indicated that I could possibly be gay. And found nothing. Everything didn’t add up, nothing made sense, and I was crying every night because of it.
    Something had to have been wrong with me. That was it. I wasn’t sure what it was, but there was definitely something wrong with me as a person. I was an imperfection. Something that needed fixing, something that could never ever be right. An oddity in humanity. And I hated every minute of it, but there was nothing… nothing that I could do.
    So I shoved more people away from me, and mingled with another group of people. We started the second semester of college, and I started to seek out my old friends slowly but surely as I started to hang around with more different people. People who knew nothing about me- knew none of my secrets, and I could be someone completely different with. I wanted a fresh start, but I found that those lingering attachments that I thought that I had severed were still there. I found that I couldn’t leave those people who had remained by my side for four years of social rejection in high school.
    As much as I wanted too, still being distant for reasons only known to me. But they had come to be so used to me being weird or awkward that it came as no surprise to them. In fact, they didn’t even realize that there was anything wrong in the first place, even when I had stopped being near them. When I avoided them not long into the first semester, they had just brushed it off like they had been expecting it to happen. The more I thought about this, the more it hurt. The more it hurt, the more that I wanted it to end. The more that I wanted it to end, the more that I thought about ending it permanently.
    I never picked up a razor blade and slit my wrist. I hated the people who did that, I... swore that they were just doing that for attention. Especially when they actually told people about it. Unfortunately for them, I had never, ever been one to dole out sympathy for something like that. In fact, more often then not, I was one to hand them a knife and offer to block a room for them to kill themselves in. Unless of course they wanted to kill themselves in public, then hey, yeah, there’s the knife, go on, do it. I… hated all those people. I had even told one person who had come to me to complain about life, and how slitting their wrists wasn’t killing them fast enough, to do it right the first time. Cut up the stream and not across.
    My bitter, cold attitude began to carry over into everything else. And nobody noticed. I suppose that it had been gradual enough for nobody to notice a major difference in my personality, but even my best friend hadn’t noticed that something was wrong by now. And I began to think that nobody actually cared- that nobody ever actually had. So I became even more bitter and cold to those people who tried to get close to me.
    Now, by this time in the college year, my parents had been going through a rough time in their divorce proceedings, and my mother had insisted on dragging me into the middle of things. She told me everything that was happening, blamed me for what my father was doing, and expected me to do something to right everything. I froze up every time she did that, refusing to speak to her or even give her the satisfaction of a response. Then we’d get into a fight, and things would get physical, and it became more than too much. I got fed up one day, grabbed my best friend, and dragged him to my house. We packed everything up, and I moved in with my father, not a word mentioned to my mother.
    Then the guilt was played, as she forced my younger siblings to call me, as they cried. And I ended up going back, even though life was not happy there at all. I couldn’t stand living there, and I wanted out. But I couldn’t, because everything was indeed my fault. It was always my fault, and nothing ever got any better.
    Eventually, I just started to boil everything up inside. I… had always seen myself as the one people turned to when they needed a pillar to lean on. I was the one who comforted people, and in needing comfort… In needing someone to talk to, to help me, I became weak. I wouldn’t be needed anymore. Not like I had ever been needed in the first place, as my mind had reasoned with me, but I would never be needed if I was weak. So I kept all of my weakness and hurt inside, hiding it as best I could.
    Even though the bitter coldness was still present in my lifestyle. Eventually all the bottled up emotions exploded out of me, shattering the bottle, and my last sense of reason. I blew up, and got into a rather cold, desolate argument with someone I had considered a good friend. Because this person just happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, when I had lost my temper. So, even though what this person had done was completely minor, and I had no reason at all to be so angry with this one person who had been a good friend to me, I shunned him. I pushed him away, and refused to speak to him until he apologized for something that had most definitely not been his fault at all.
    Friends took note then of my temper problems, and had pushed to try and fix things, even going, as I perceived it, behind my back to try and smooth things over. They went to him and talked to him, trying to figure out what exactly was going on between the two of us. Trying to fix things. According to all of them, we had been close enough to be kin, and we often acted like we were related. He was the only person aside from my best friend that I was ever in a good mood around, yet even so I pushed him away. There was only one person I needed around me, and that was the person that had stood by me for thirteen years of hell.
    And everyone could go to hell. I hated them all. My darkness proceeded to take over even more, as I pushed them all further, and further away. But I could never wish for them to die, as much as their existence angered me, pushed me to my threshold of sanity, threatening to break it. It felt as though all I could do was break inside, and I was constantly feeling sick in the pit of my stomach, looking at everyone hurt me to the point of closing my eyes and pretending that they didn’t exist.
    Because maybe if they didn’t exist, my pain would go away.
    It didn’t.
    I stopped attending my classes, disappeared and only showed up when it pleased me to do so. I was sick, though it wasn’t a physical sickness. It was a mental one. Again, psychoanalyzing myself after the last psychology class that I willingly attended, I decided that I was depressed. I fit almost all the requirements that caused psychologists and psychiatrists to diagnose someone as ‘clinically depressed’. But this, I couldn’t believe. That, well, that had to be lies. I wasn’t depressed, I was just angry. I couldn’t be depressed, I was broken enough as it was, I didn’t need something else to fix.
    …I later found myself in a dark room, waiting, since someone was supposed to be coming over to do an assignment for class with me, and holding a gleaming silver blade in my hand. My head was reeling as I looked at the sharp blade, my mind running through all rational thoughts and dismissing them. Throwing them away so that I could think about what needed to be done.
    I looked at the blade, and pictured it piercing my flesh, the blood that would spill from it. Yeah, it would be painful- so very painful. But the pain would only last a minute, and then I wouldn’t feel the pain anymore. I looked up at the mirror beside the chair which I was sitting on, and looked at my pale face. It looked terrible. I looked terrible. Was this what the hurt was doing to me? The face that stared back at me had a sick, hollow look in its eyes. Something that had once been preened to perfection, taken care of and healthy, now looked so sickly that it disgusted me.
    I was disgusting. An eyesore, a cancerous piece organism in the bowels of society. And something needed to be done about it. I was the one who needed to do it. I was the one who needed to get rid of this cancer, because nobody else even deemed that I existed as such. My gaze flickered from the face back to the perfect, shining blade in my hands. It was perfect, sharpened so that it gleamed even in this darkness, where the light almost couldn’t reach. It was that small little bit of hope that was left for society when it came to creatures like myself who didn’t belong there. It was what could be used to eradicate the poisonous touch of those of us who happened to be broken, and wrong.
    And it was there; ready to take me away from this place that didn’t want me, didn’t need me, and would do better without me. My gaze went back up to the mirror, to look at myself again. This broken, waist of flesh. My eyes, sunken and sickly, too in the look of my dark hair, disheveled, unkempt, and obviously not taken care of. And those new friend seemed to think that I was beautiful. I was gorgeous. Heh. If only they could have seen me then, if they had seen me then, they never would have thought that. They would have thought otherwise, and would have run.
    They all would have run. And they should have from the start. Because by talking to me, by being around me, my disease would spread to them. And they would be broken too. So I had to stop myself, before I let the disease spread even further. The blade in my hand was light, surprisingly light, as I lifted it level with my face. All it would take was one, short movement, and I would be free. The world would be free from my disease, and everyone who had been around me, could be happy. I wouldn’t be there to make them miserable anymore.
    They had never said as much, but I had seen it in their eyes. I believed that it was there, the anger, the hurt, and the resentment that they felt for me, pulling out of their faces into my mind. I wanted to stop that hurt to the very end, and this was the best way to do it.
    Turning the knife in my hand, I leveled it with my heart, and looked down at it. I took the handle in both hands and took a deep breath it was now, or never-
    -It turned out to be never, as the door to the darkness opened as I had turned the knife. And the person who opened the door had managed to take my breath span to get to where I was. I had taken just enough time to allow for me to be stopped, because the hand was on the blade, pulling it away from me. Out of my hands. Out of my reach.
    And they did what I had needed most for that time. For those long days and months of internal misery. They took me in their arms, and held me, letting me cry, and spill it out. Tell everything, and cry to someone other than my pillow. Somebody who would listen to me, and not judge me openly. They stayed with me, consoled me, and helped me sleep. For three days. And helped me reason out everything that was going on, explaining to myself, and to that person, that everything was logical and had a reason.
    And they helped me to realize that I wasn’t broken, that I wasn’t different at all. They helped me to pull that thought out of my head, helped me to think everything through rationally, and brought me back down to some semblance of sanity.
    Unfortunately, I have never seen that person again. I don’t remember his name; I don’t remember what he looks like. But I do remember his kindness and what he did for me. I remember that someone who had nothing to do with me, someone I had not even considered an acquaintance, had helped me through the roughest time in my life.
    I’ve never tried to kill myself again, and I’ve started to attempt rebuilding my friendships that I lost thanks to my actions. It happens to be a long and hard road, and I’ve been making some progress, even if it is only a small amount at a time. It adds up.
    After all, who would know better than me?
    Hi, I’m Zane, and though I’m ashamed to say it, I tried to kill myself, and nearly succeeded.