I Shouldn't Exist...

"I read it in the newspaper a couple of days ago. Some guys is developing a bomb big enough to destroy the entire United States. He said he'd be done a few months after you turn sixteen, and then he's going to set it off."

At the tender age of eight, this was said to me by an older kid in the lunch room. I was facing the stage, and as he spoke I stared at the stop light we had on the stage. It had been brought in to help us keep quiet. At the time it was at Yellow, which meant we had to lower our voices. I couldn't have spoken even if I wanted to. I had just found out I had no future. I was going to die at the age of sixteen.

I lived my life until I was sixteen as if I was going to die. I never thought I would be able to vote, drink, gamble (not that I cared about that), even drive. By the time I got older I realized that there was no way at all this was true, but I felt in my heart that something was going to happen to me anyway.

I lived my entire sixteenth year in fear. I honestly prepared my room everyday so that I knew what it looked like before I died. I dropped into a very deep depression. The day I turned seventeen held no joy for me. In fact it was thrown by my best friend who promptly told me after the party I was a drag to be with, and that we shouldn't be friends anymore.

The first three years of driving felt odd to me, as if I wasn't ever meant to do it. In fact I didn't even bother getting my license until I was seventeen. By everytime I went somewhere on my own, I never found a good parking spot. I would park far away, and as soon as I was out of my car everyone in the first few spots would pull out. I didn't really live life anymore because it wasn't worth living if I was going to die anyday now.

The depression got deeper, and I quickly got to the point where I didn't have any friends. I liked a boy who refused to like me back, that didn't help at all. When we went to a swim meet together and he told me that was going to the junior prom with someone else (who was also on the swim team) Everything came crashing down. It was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I got to thinking about the lack of friends that I had, the seperation I felt from the world around me, the fact that a boy simply wouldn't like me back, the fact that everything had gone wrong in my life. Then it dawned on me through the tears of my torment...I was supposed to be dead. God must have passed over me by accident. I had fallen through the cracks on the Angel of Death's list. I knew what I had to do.

I opened the door to the Embassy Suites hotel room we were all staying in that night, and I took off for the stairs. I tore the door open with all my might and walked up the stairs as quickly as I could in my berginstocks. I watched as every floor I went up a sign called to me saying "roof axcess."

I had reached the top. The door was electric, the stairs sort of ended into it. I punched the big red button that opened the roof. My mind was already reeling with someone finding my body. I could see the mess I would make all of the pavement. "Who will have to clean it up?" I wondered. Would my crush finally see then that I was worthy? That it was his fault and he should have just gone out with me?

The electrical engine whirred as it started to open. Then stop. I got a little irritated, as I would when the garage door keep getting caught on something and going back. I punched the round button again, sure that this time it would open.

It did not. It was locked.

I screamed louder than I have ever screamed in my life. I had gotten past over, it wasn't even like I was killing myself, I just wanted to correct the mistake that God had made. I'm not supposed to be here! I started kicking the door, then pounding into it with my knuckles. Within minutes they had become bloody. I pounded on that door until I had no strength left in me. It was seven flights of steps down, back to the hotel room. The hotel room that held all the other team mates was open, and I had to walk right past it.

I couldn't do it. It was shameful to have such a failure. I would wait until everyone was asleep...but they were playing truth or dare, and I'm sure they planned to stay up all night. I had failed. I should be dead, instead I'm still here, and I still have to deal with what is going on....that I had become so depressed I had pushed everyone away. No one would be my friend because I was a downer to be with. I pushed that to the back of my mind and started down the stairs to my walk of shame. Not that anyone would know what I did.

It would be a year before I pulled myself up out of the depression that had started that day in the lunchroom when I was eight. And they say words are just words.

To this day I still wonder if something was supposed to happen...everytime I go somewhere and get the worst parking spot in the place, when they lose my reservations, etc. Was my life truely meant to be happening now? Either way, I'm living it now, and I'm not going to let anyone take it away from me.