Page 7 of Kill Me

“It’s ok, my darling. No need to get so het up; I have you.” She pats him on the shoulder. If they weren’t related, there are moments you would think they were having a sexual relationship. It’s fucking icky. “I know you would never speak to me this way. I no longer let her affect me. Don’t give her the satisfaction of your reaction, it’s what she wants.”

My mouth drops. I can’t believe she just fucking said that. She’s a right one to talk.

I sigh. “I give up. What do you want me to do next?”

“There is a form of therapy called ECT—”

“You want me to fry my brain?!”

“Can I fucking finish?” my mother scolds me like the inconvenience I am to her, and she looks me dead in the face. I need to shut the fuck up before this escalates, that much is clear. Having been on the wrong side of her and Eric, both at the same time, more than once, I can safely say that is not something I wish to participate in right now.

I nod, taking my trembling hands off the table and folding them in my lap, so as not to make my palpitating fear so obvious, and reduce myself to the demure, invisible girl they desire me to be.

Despite what they say about me, they’re the ones who thrive off of reactions. When they know I’m scared, it’s like a moth to a flame, and it never ends well. A hand brushes against mine under the table, and I look to my right to see my dad with a sorrowful look on his face as he tries to secretly comfort me. Unfortunately for my dad, it’s too late for his bullshit efforts, and I rip my hand away from his. He’s doing it more for his benefit than mine. On my left is Eric, and you know in those superhero shows where they burn shit with their eyes? Yeah, that’s what he looks like right now. His eyes are molten lava, like he could annihilate my fucking soul in a second, and I don’t know about you, but that’s not the kind of annihilation this girl wants.

Eric’s hands are also under the table, and for a second, I think he may be about to comfort me. Joke's on me, though, when I feel his fork stab into my thigh. Not enough to cause injury, but enough to hurt. Suppressing the urge to hiss out loud and endure his wrath even more, I swallow, adjust my position, and listen like the good little girl they wanted but never got. Sucks to be them.

“Your father and I have made an appointment for you next week. It’s not a request. If you want to continue to be part of this family, then you will go.”

“And if I don’t go?”

“Then I will not be responsible for my actions…”

The next thing I remember is waking up in a pain I’ve never felt before, unable to walk. They said it was temporary. That within a year I’d be back to my normal self—whatever that was—but the fixations that were supposed to be out after twelve weeks were still in after nine months, and a year down the line I could still barely stand up unaided, let alone walk.

Now, seven years later—here I am. Can I walk? Yes? Am I better? Hell-the-fuck-no. The monsters that haunted my mind beforehand are bigger and scarier now. They’re louder. Every day, all I hear is ‘kill yourself’, and ‘no one wants you’, or ‘no one loves you, your scars are ugly’. But my favourite has to be, ‘you should do the world a favour and die’. But there was one thing my mum said that resonated with me from that day: ‘I’ve done everything I possibly could do to get better; I just haven’t been as lucky as you’. Was it all me? Was I the sole reason for the friction within our family and the fact that I couldn’t heal? I used to think it was her, but the more time goes on, the more unsure I become.

Chapter Six

Quinn - Present Day

And that, my friends, is how I’ve found myself here. Walking to my favourite bridge next to the busiest road in our town, with a final choice to make. So desperate to end the torture inside my mind, I’d rather not live any longer. If I go to the left, I land in oncoming traffic, potentially causing trauma to other people who happen to see me jump or a car that could hit me—again, and maybe not even finish the job if past experience is anything to go by. Or, I could go to the right and plummet into below-freezing water, hopefully never to be seen alive again, until I potentially wash up on the side of the bank one day for a lonely old fisherman to find, looking like a puffer fish. But then I still risk not doing the job properly, potentially paralysing myself and spending my life even more fucking miserable. Decisions, decisions.

We’d make the decision for you, but you’re too dumb to listen.

The bridge I’ve chosen is close enough to home that I don’t have to travel too far, but far enough and abandoned enough that no one would happen to come across me. It’s not like they’ll miss me anyway. Probably won’t even notice I’m gone until they realise their verbal punching bag isn’t there to take their jabs. There’s a local cemetery on the other side, but I’ve never seen anyone in there in the time I’ve been doing my recon. The bridge is blocked off to the public. A big red sign that says ‘DANGER-UNSTABLE STRUCTURE-RISK OF DEATH’ screams at me to go back, to return home to my family and beg them to listen—but adult me has never been a fan of doing as I’m told. It’s almost like a big red warning light that tells you to leave a building when it’s on fire or a natural disaster has struck, but instead it’s telling me where I can kill myself. Ironic that the one thing keeping the public safe is the one signal to a mentally ill person that it could be their way out.

I remember the first time I attempted suicide as an adult with tablets other than paracetamol after seeing a horror story on TV. I sat there in front of the assessor, who marked me as a low risk because my hair was washed and my pyjamas matched. God forbid a depressed person has the capacity to be hygienic at the same time. The funny thing is, my hygiene is the first thing to go, but I live with my mother, who likes to let the entire world know that her daughter is disgusting and doesn’t wash if I go any longer than a day without a shower. Her actions in turn have led to me being obsessed with cleanliness. Everything has a place. Everything has to be in that place because if it doesn’t, then bad things will happen.

When the doctor came round to see me later on, they informed me that I was clearly attention-seeking because my specific antidepressants were the kind that I would never be able to successfully overdose on. Some would say that was a stupid thing to say to a suicidal person. But they didn’t think I was suicidal. They thought I was faking it. So the next time, I overdosed on the morphine they prescribed me for the pain since my accident. When they asked why I had escalated, I told them because a doctor had told me a better way to be successful.

I mean, I wasn’t wrong, was I?

Unfortunately, that then resulted in my mother being in charge of my medication, and me only ever being allowed it if she deemed that I had done enough physical activity for my pain levels to be worthy of my emergency painkiller. Different when she’s swigging it behind my back and telling the doctors that I dropped the bottle and smashed it because she’d used it all, though, isn’t it?

I snap out of the memory when horns screech at me for walking in front of them.

Clearly didn’t learn a lesson there, did I?

As I’m headed to the bridge, I recap the last few days in my mind. My audiobook plays in my ears if only because I couldn’t possibly die with an unfinished book.

It’s been two days since they told me they had re-booked my ECT appointment after not being able to make the original one due to my accident. I’ve spent the entirety of those two days communicating with Dr Google and dealing with my monsters trying to convince me to kill myself before I get there. I think it’s obvious who won.

It’s three days until D-day, with tomorrow being the initial consultation, so my only chance to avoid it is this moment. If I'm honest with myself, the only reason I stopped arguing about it with them is because I was sick of hearing how they had wasted a thousand pounds for me not to turn up. Like I’d decided to walk in front of a car all by myself.

Everything I found online about ECT was, quite honestly, fucking terrifying. The potential risk factors and side effects are ringing like alarm bells in my brain, with the monsters attempting to drown them out by shouting louder.

Don’t let them do it to us.