Member-only story
Leaving
I killed myself when I was sixteen.
I tied my father’s belt in a loop around the SMC fan that hung in our living room and stood on the dining chair for eternity, looking through the loop. It was a portal through which I could see our family pictures hanging on a wall — my father, in the same tweed coat he wore to the League club every Saturday; my mother in a wide-brimmed hat traced the same curve of her smile; and my twin sisters — babies at the time, sleeping in their pram firmly held by my eldest sister a full head taller than me. They all faded from focus as I wound the buckled noose around my neck and waited.
I’d written a suicide note; if the one-liner I scrawled out in ink on a roughly torn-out page counted as one. In it, I’d said:
I am not one of you
But I was afraid.
Grief nibbled at the edges of my steely resolve. Doubt wandered down the slopes of my consciousness leaving a trail to the uncertainty of what would happen after I let the chair go. I was still thinking when I heard the thud of the heavy mahogany high chair crashing against the wooden edge of the living room sofa. I felt pain in my foot as I crashed to the terrazzo floor, spraining my ankle in the process. Then sounds followed reminding me that I had failed.
