At fifteen, I had nowhere to go. That wasn’t some teenage melodrama; it was a hard, physical reality. The man who’d played the hero, the one who pulled me from my mother’s fire, had just tossed me back into it to keep his new wife happy. Two years playing house in their “shit-don’t-stink” family, and just like that, I was back on the street with nothing but a skateboard and a gut full of acid.
That night, my head wasn’t right. Thoughts ran in circles like rats in a bucket, spiraling into a kind of raw emotion I couldn’t control. The safety net I thought I had was gone, ripped away for some bullshit reason I couldn’t even name. My skateboard was the only thing moving forward, cutting through the empty suburban streets while tears I didn’t want streamed down my face.
I stopped under a flickering streetlamp, just staring into the black mouth of the night. I screamed. A raw, ragged sound tearing out of my chest, an inventory of all the anger and despair spilling out like a dam break.
“The deck of cards I was dealt,” I yelled at the empty houses, my voice cracking, “it never gets better! I can’t fucking win this game!”
The words just echoed and died in the stillness.
Hunger started gnawing at me, sharp and real. I ended up in a grocery store, the fluorescent lights buzzing, making everything look sick and pale. My eyes scanned the shelves, not for food, but for an exit. I slipped a bottle of sleeping pills into my pocket. The idea formed without much thought, simple and clean as a razor blade.
Skateboard under my arm, I wandered until I found a spot behind some white Lutheran church. The silence there felt different, almost holy. I drank from their garden hose, the cold water hitting my empty stomach like a stone. I sat down in the dirt and stared at the bottle of pills in my hand.
I wasn’t crying anymore. The storm had passed, leaving behind that hollow, dead calm. The voices in my head finally shut up. For the first time in hours, I felt still.
One by one, I pushed those little white pills into my mouth, washing them down with a metallic gulp of garden hose water. A cheap communion for a cheap exit. Time to sleep, I figured. Time to let the whole goddamn rotten show go on without me.
I laid down on the cold sidewalk, the concrete biting through my thin jacket. Used my skateboard as a pillow, the grip tape scratching against my cheek. And as the pills started their slow, warm crawl through my gut, as the edges of the world began to soften and blur, a strange thing happened. I felt happy. A quiet kind of relief.
This is it, I thought, my last night on this miserable rock. At least I’ll finally get a good night’s sleep out of the deal.
When I woke up, the sun was already climbing, its light a brutal violation to my swollen eyes. The taste of bile was glued to my tongue. Beside me, in the dirt, was a small, foamy pool of vomit. My stomach twisted, but I managed to sit up, wiping my mouth on the back of my sleeve.
I was still alive. Goddammit.
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. The world hadn’t ended. The great escape had failed. And now I had to face the ugly glare of another day.
I got up, brushed the dirt off my pants, and grabbed my skateboard. My body ached, my head pounded, but I moved forward. One push, then another.
I needed a home. I needed something stronger than a bottle of sleeping pills. I needed a real escape.
The road ahead felt impossible, a long, black stretch of nothing. But it was the only road I had. The edge of everything hadn’t been sharp enough to take me out, so now it was my turn to see what kind of a scar I could leave on it.
Whether I wanted it or not, I was still here.
Author’s Note
This isn’t a story about some grand, tragic dance with death. Let’s get that straight. It’s a story about being fifteen and so goddamn tired that even oblivion looks like a warm bed. This wasn’t a noble, poetic exit. It was a handful of stolen sleeping pills, a drink from a stranger’s garden hose, and a plan to just… stop. It was a vote to quit the game because you’re convinced the deck is stacked and always will be.
But the real punchline isn’t in the trying; it’s in the waking up.
The universe plays a cruel joke. You make your grand gesture to leave the party, and you just wake up with a hangover in your own vomit, the sun stabbing you in the eyes, the party still raging on without you. Even death rejects your application.
And that’s the only lesson there is. You find out you’re too stubborn or too stupid for even the void to take you seriously. So you get up, brush the dirt off your pants, and start walking. Not because you’re brave, not because you’ve seen the light.
But because there’s nowhere else to go.
