Six Feet Under

It’s not worth it. I don’t want to fight anymore. I thought bitterly. I looked down at the bottle in my hands. It would be so easy.
I sat back and thought for a moment, I tried to sort things out in my head, but I couldn’t. The only thing that filled my head was him; the one who had done this to me. Those eyes, which had looked into mine with bloodlust, and all the pain they represented. I couldn’t do it.
I felt like he was playing cat and mouse with my brain. In this case, I was the defenseless rodent, cornered, frightened and desperate. And of course, he was the cat, sitting back and enjoying the show. I didn’t really care for the fact that he would rot in a stinking prison all his life, he had still done this to me, and he knew.
He knew that I would never be the same, that I would never truly live, that I would never want to live again after what he’d done to me. So he could just sit back, and savor every sick little thought that he could imagine about how he’d destroyed me.
I felt tears burn my eyes, and forced them back down. I wasn’t going to cry, not out of frustration, or anger, or sadness. Guys don’t cry, they just solve the problem. That’s what my brother had always told me, anyway. Well, I’m solving the problem, Tetsu.
For a long time, the only thing that had kept me alive, was knowing that if I gave up and let myself die, he would win. That’s what I told myself, but then I realized something. He’d already won.
He’d taken everything away from me. Tortured me, in more ways then one. He destroyed my life, and that was exactly what he wanted. He wanted me to live in hollow agony for the rest of my miserable existence. So, killing myself, that’s not what he wanted. He already got what he wanted, so now it was my turn. I deserved this little bit satisfaction. Peace. An ounce of peace is all I want.
I clutched the prescription pills in my hands. The where pain killers, strong ones. I don’t remember the brand name, they where just one more brick in the wall of meds I’d been on since I got back home. I read the label, which it had a large warning on it. It cautioned against anyone under the weight of one hundred and twenty pounds taking anymore than two a day and taking any of them with alcohol. It had other warnings, dumb ones that told you not to operate machinery, or that the pills could cause drowsiness.
I opened the bottle and dumped a few of the pills into my hand. I normally wouldn’t have picked such an easily thwarted method of suicide, but I didn’t want to cause my family extra grief. I doubted if my father would care at all, but I knew my mother would rather not see me with a forty-five-bullet hole in my head. I swallowed the pills and them emptied a few more out of the bottle into my hand.
I felt like I was someone had taken hold on my lungs with an iron gauntlet and was taking great pleasure in slowly suffocating me. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t sleep, and that how I lived my whole life now. I took the last of the pills and collapsed on my bed. No one would be home for hours, and even when they got here, I doubted they’d notice right off the bat.
I was always tired; it was a common symptom of clinical depression. That fact would make this whole thing easier, I had decided that I wanted to just go to sleep and hope I don’t wake up. Why? Because sleeping had always been comforting to me, at least up until recently, when my dreams had been plagued with nightmares.
I remember slowly slipping out of consciousness about ten minutes later. At the time, I thought it was impossible, but I could have sworn I heard someone calling out to me at some point.
The next time I remember anything is waking up to white walls, and as I looked around, I realized I was in a hospital. No… how did I
end up here? I wondered. The room was empty, which didn’t surprise me.
My family was always busy, and I highly doubted they had the time of day to spend sitting next to my limp body for however long I’d been out cold.
I hung my head. Damn…
I knew it was selfish, I knew they’d be upset, and angry, and that was the last thing I wanted to deal with right now. Really, just thinking like that was selfish. I knew that I should be sorry for how badly I’d hurt them, but they didn’t understand how desperate I was. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to love them, I just, couldn’t anymore. Before everything that happened with… with him, I loved my family more than anything else in the world. If I had done something like this back then, I would’ve felt awful, guilty, sickened even. Now it was like someone had hollowed out my heart, and it was as cold and gray as the December sky.
A large part of the reason that I didn’t care, I think, was because I wanted to care. I wanted to care so badly.  I wanted my family life to go back to normal, and I couldn’t force myself to make it that way. I think that in the back of my mind, I knew it was my fault, but I wanted to blame them. I wanted to say that my family had changed, not me, and that was why I didn’t care anymore. So, in a way, that had made me resent them. Or maybe I was over thinking it, maybe I just didn’t care for anything anymore, and to hide how hollow I was, I was trying to give everything a deep, psychological reasoning.
I sat there for probably an hour, pondering everything from my life, to my reasons for trying to end it. Eventually someone came into the room, and unfortunately, he was probably the worst person who could have been there right then.
My brother Tetsuka stood by the door, arms crossed. His first words were brutal on my ears.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” He demanded. I didn’t cringe, like I had expected myself to. I just stared at him, as blank as the hospital’s blanch white walls.
“Don’t you dare give me that look. Not after I had to drag your sorry ass to this hospital, half dead! What is wrong with you? What were you thinking?”
I frowned. So, he was the one who found me? Giving Tetsu a slight sigh, I replied quietly. “I’m sorry, Tetsu.”
But I wasn’t.
I think Tetsu knew it, too, but his expression changed. He looked at me with softer eyes, worried eyes. “Hiru, why? I thought you said you were getting better? If you were slipping, why didn’t you tell us?” He asked, approaching my bed and gripping the sides of it.
This, I didn’t know. Why hadn’t I asked for help? But then again, I had never been one for teamwork. I was always a loner, afraid that if I asked for help, I’d hurt the person I’d asked. Tetsu knew this about me by now, but I suppose he’d just given me the benefit of the doubt.
Which was definitely a bad choice on his part.