---
“You know you’ll have to go back to the hospital, right?”
---
A half eaten grilled cheese.
---
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
---
I’m strong enough now
I am allowed to see friends.
An angel comes first.
My hair is matted,
I have been rolling in sweat
For nearly two days.
She does my make up.
“Make me pretty, please.” She does.
“Thank you, you saved me.”
She does not stay long,
But she gives me a tight hug,
Says, “I am glad you didn’t die.”
My answer gets lost.
---
I tried to kill myself.
---
A nurse walks me to the bathroom.
---
My mom comes back.
---
Visitors. Visitors. Visitors.
---
“You are incredibly lucky to be alive.”
---
I did this.
---
My best friend comes next.
I lied. I told her to leave.
I said I was fine.
---
“It’s time for you to take a shower. You can’t do it yourself, would you like your mom to help you?”
I feel more comfortable with my best friend.
She carries me to the bathroom.
Our moms chat in the corner.
---
She washes my hair,
Washes away all the grime,
Nearing death is gross.
We are both fourteen,
She shouldn’t be doing this.
I don’t deserve this.
---
My own clothes, no more hospital gown.
---
A chair pulled up to my bed.
---
“Can you give me a hug?”
---
Her arms around me,
We hold tightly onto life,
Onto each other.
We both bleed out tears.
“We still have so much to do.
You cannot die yet.”
---
I still have the bear she gave me that day.
---
November 26th will never not hurt.
---
“Five more minutes and you may not have made it.”
Happy Pills
[15 years old]
The thing about getting addicted to pills is that you become quite used to experimenting
Any medication you look at starts to become tempting.
So when I was fresh out of rehab again and I started to feel a relapse coming on
I remembered once taking a few of my mom’s antidepressants and nothing had gone wrong
I had gotten a little high, nothing too crazy
It might be a good way to abate me
Because I knew I was gonna fuck up again and it was going to happen soon
But if I could do something different, I could put it off for at least a day or two.
So I found my mom’s prescription pills, I think I took maybe four, before bed one night
And I tripped enough to make a man and a story appear out of the little green light
On the fire alarm in my mother’s bedroom; this visual comforted me
The only negative side effect is that I had awful and vivid dreams.
I dreamed I could hear God’s voice threatening to pull me through to the other side
It was so real that I genuinely wasn’t sure if I would wake up the next day and be alive
I thought it was a sign that I needed to kill myself, needed to at long last disappear
Besides, I figured drugs would kill me at some point within the next few years.
To ease my mind from divine confusion, I took some more pills, this time eight
That’s how many triple cs I would do at once, I figured if it’d make me feel great
I wasn’t prepared for how terrifying it is to hallucinate
Especially when you aren’t expecting the drugs
