Be Calm and Listen - The Death of a Friend

Two months after my dad got out of the hospital, I was still self-harming. Although, you can hardly call it self-harming when you barely draw a pinprick of blood with a dull knife. Plus I was still afraid of what I might do to myself if I cut too deep, so there were only five 1-inch-long scratches on my left wrist.

As I mentioned before, I was in gymnastics, but I didn't really got into details. In January 2016 I was twelve years old and on the Excel Gold team. The Excel programs are just like the regular team, but there were less hours at the gym. So, in March I had a competition. Since I had moved, I switched gyms. So, when I saw that would be competing against my old team, I freaked out because I hadn't seen or heard from them in seven months. We had a great competition, and I went out with Lacy, Kelly, and Amy for pizza afterwards.

(Note: I changed their names because... ya know)

Well, I was stuffing pizza into my mouth, laughing at a joke that Lacy had made, when Amy asked, "Do you know what happened to Melanie?"

I shook my head and continued to shove pizza in my face, and they all stared at me.

"What?" I asked. They were freaking me out. What happened to Melanie? Was she in the hospital maybe? She always was shy, and had a tendency to get sick a lot, so I was really worried.

Amy lowered her voice. "She passed away."

"W-what?" I asked, in shock.

"She committed suicide." Kelly said.

I couldn't speak for five minutes. Sure, we still had a great time, but my mind was about to explode because Melanie was gone. I was one of the only people on our team that could make her smile. Rarely I would even get a little laugh! She two years older than me, and the thought of her holding a gun to her head, jumping off of a bridge, or hanging from the ceiling with a rope around her neck made me want to barf.

That experience changed me for better and for worse. It made me extremely sad for two reasons. One, she was gone. For good. I could've tried harder to break her out of her shell, and I failed. I couldn't help her. Two, if she committed suicide, then what right do I have to cut myself when someone else's life is so much worse than mine?

That night, after my mom and dad had went to bed, I broke down in tears, trying not to sob to loudly for fear of waking someone up. That memory is so engraved in my memory that I might as well have it written on my forehead.

She's gone.

She's dead.

She's never coming back.

Stay calm and listen.

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