I am sitting at the dining room table in my father's house. No one is home except for me. My grandmother is in the hospital and I can't get up enough energy to go visit her. My dad says I am lazy. There is less truth in this than in anything.
If I step one foot out the door I will freeze, if I draw in one long cold breath I will die. I will go mad. I will not make it to the hospital, I will plunge myself head first over the ridge. Under it, it is covered with solid ice through half of the river, the other half is raging water. One thing stops me - which will hurt worse, the water or the ice?
I get up from the table and put on some music. Loud, angry, death usic to quench my rage. To quench my hate for all humans.
Candles are lit around the room. Little spirits aglow with life, soon to be dead in one breath. Flames equivalent to the fire in my brain, scorching the surface, soon to burn.
Taking sips from my drink - vodka and grape kool-aid, I stare at the bottle of forbidden pills and debate my motives. Is there a Heaven?
Deadly, beautiful pills, snow white orbs with numbers engraved on one side like prisoners. I line up 15 symmetrically. Little Jews filing into the gas chamber.
The music is pumping through my veins and my veins are screaming. I swallow each pill - one by one with the vodka. With each swallow I feel a little closer to death. I write, I wait, I scream, I cry, I laugh. What will happen to me? I begin writing the final chapter of my life, my suicidal dreams, fears, regrets, secrets, apologies, everything I can think of to reconcile and conclude my life here on Earth.
Dear Joe, I loved you, where are you?
Dear Jessica, I am not a hippie wannabe, I'm searching for inner peace.
Dear Father, you love that goddamned computer more than me.
I do not want to rot in the ground. Creamate me and spread my ashes at Radio City Music Hall. No, the ocean would be better. Set me free.
Tick...tick...time passes and I am feeling dizzy, weak, and my head is so clouded. I smile for the first time in months, I mean really smile. I am scared of someone finding me, but these barbiturates calm my brain in light waves. My vision is hazy and maybe I'm crazy.
I spin around in circles laughing, listening to Dylan, falling down, rolling on the floor, drooling all over myself. I don't care.
My dad is home. I hear him. I am a deer in headlights. I turn the music off. He sees me, he doesn't speak to me, he's still mad at me and sits down to make love to his computer. I carry my paraphenalia to my dungeon, to my prison cell with the fluffy pillows.
Shit! I drop the pills all over the floor. My knees buckle as I frantically crawl around to pick up all of them. My vision is so blurry it looks like a patch of snow on the carpet. One by one I plink them into the bottle. I...can't...get...them...all. So weak. Tired. I crawl into bed, everything swirling around me. I am lying still but I am flying in midair somersaults. No sense of gravity. My eyes pulled by invisible weights.
I drift to sleep forever.

I wake early and get ready for school. I am enraged to be alive. I'm stil wasted, so it's okay for now. I walk, float, to school on the slush and arrive to learn I have been asleep for two whole days!
I move from class to class like a zombie. Speaking for once with loose-tongued heat of phenobarbitol bliss.
Everyone think I'm stoned. I'm glassy-eyed and slow. Mmmm...much better. I make it the whole day sedated and unnoticed by teachers.
Last period of the day I sit in the library half asleep, half reading and who walks in - the school nurse deciding to give me a hearing and vision test.
"Have you started taking medication recently?" she asks.
"No, why?" I say as normally as possible. It sounds like a ball of mush.
"Your speech is slurred. Are you on something?"
Even though I try not to, I am possessed into telling her everything about last night, two nights ago, whatever.
Mr. Evans, the school counselor, walks in and is talking to the nurse quiet so I can't hear. He wants me to come to his office so I follow. We talk. Question, response, it is so easy to speak I don't think, just ramble on aimlessly.
I confess that I am so dehydrated I could scream and he brings me a cup of water. I drink it down in one gulp. He brings me another and I savor it slowly.
"I have an important meeting to go to. Do you have any pills on you?" he asks.
"No."
"Will you be okay? You won't hurt yourself, will you?"
"I'll be all right."
"I won't be long"
I wait. There are all sorts of toys around the room. I throw a slimy toy creature against the wall. When I am bored I sit in the big, comfy armchair with the trippy design and start to doze off. Tick...tick...
Mr. Evans is still not back yet. I am deciding to kill myself right here.
To commit suicide, I believe, you need to disconnect your mind from your body. You need to imagine yourself dead. Watch your body twist beneath the wheels of the train, if there is a rope hanging in the basement, see yourself hanging, neck broken, blue, dead.
I pull out the bottle and swallow handful after handful like candy until they are gone. I am glad to be dying soon. I settle into the big chair to die. I sleep.
Mr. Evans is talking on the phone. I hear his voice, but I can't open my eyes.
"...sleeping now...progressively worse...I'll take her myself...she's not responding."
I open my eyes then and move around so he knows I'm not dead. He leads me out. There are tiny stars racing past me, making me fall, but Mr. Evans is holding me up. I lean into him as we walk down this endless tunnel through space and time.
I sleep in his car. When we arrive at the hospital I am greeted ever so kindly by two men and a wheelchair, a free ride - how lovely
The hospital smells sterile and white. This man is pushing me so fast I want to vomit, but I am too weak. I...can't...hang on...any longer.
Blackness, light, sounds distorted slowing down. I walk down the mazes and hallways of my mind once cluttered with cobwebs. My eyes are open, I think, and I see doors that I reach out for but I am moving so fast I can't grasp onto a handle.
I am scared now. Where am I going? This is no hospital.
I am poked with needles. I am so relaxed they feel good. I am naked. I have to pee - so I do. I can't feel the warmth.
There are insects crawling all over my arms, they are biting me, burning my veins. I throw them off of me, long tubes - worms? They pinch - leaches? They stab me again and again, these leaches, and they won't come off. It is an endless battle. Someone is scolding me for this, "No mommy don't hurt me!"
I se a white form - an angel? Her lips are moving very slow. She is angry. I smile, or I think I am smiling.
My throat is closing. I can't breathe, I lie still. I don't need air. I am a mermaid. I am a sunfish. More accurately I am a whale. They are shoving whole bananas with peels down my throat. I pull it out. It vibrates my esophagus and they keep on shoving the banana down my throat. Another battle I can't win, but I fight relentlessly until I collapse.
A woman wheels a plate of breakfast to me. I am so thirsty the inside of my mouth is chafing and no sounds come out when I speak. I try to scream for the tall glass of orange juice. No one hears me. I reach for it, make desperate hand signals, no one understand my frantic charade. There is a banana in my throat.
I wave in and out of consciousness, in and out of mania. Tiles of perception contrasting black and white, yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night - all the indecisions and opposites that are bad enough in real life without having a flag waved to tell you you're crazy. You're insane. Sane in an insane world. The truth of it all - ready for the loony bin.
I walk in through the door which locks behind me, trapping me. No escape. I see people, maybe everyone, sitting in front of a TV rotting what is left of their brains.
I sit, quiet, separate, writing down my anger in a new notebook given to me by my new shrink.
"Enough to kill an elephant," he marvels at the amount of pheno I had taken.
Days fade into weeks, weeks into months, seasons change and they want to drug me or I am threated to stay here longer. They want to kill the voices in my head. Tehy want to kill my only real friends - my eternal companions. I must protect them. We must protect each other. Reincarnate of Jupiter, and I of Mars.
I am homesick and dying slowly - so I swallow...hard. They check under my tongue.
It is all I can do. I am writing away the weeks still nd day by day I am more lethargic and less animated and creative. My voices are dead. My friends disappeared. I have nothing worth saying or thinking, and I don't know how I've gone from being relatively energetic to genuinely pathetic. Lifeless. Numb.
They are letting me go home. I can't wait. I am watching the hours, waiting, watching, waiting. Finally.
Now that I am home I am culture shocked. It is hard to give up the routined schedule of the psycho ward. I eat, smoke, sleep, and wake on the same clockwork pattern. Seeing old friends is like visiting strangers. They are different. Maybe I am too.
I know suicide is not the answer. Actually, it causes more problems than before. Usually it doesn't work out anyway. My voices may be gone forever, but I have clarity of mind. I still mourn the loss of their company. But, I know I can look back in nostalgia and remember how they made me dance and scream and feel a whole spectrum of false emotion. I can remember them when I look up into the stars. I have the memories and a greater strength. I will never be the same.

Chantal Forrest