I hate myself.

Bold statement, I know, but it’s true. Ask me to find any feature about myself that I like - and I can’t. I’m not clever, I’m not pretty, I’m not physically capable.

In other words, I’m a wreck.

I’ve thought about killing myself quite a lot. Leaving behind a note, walking out the door, drinking bleach somewhere where no one will find me. I’d rather they worried than had to see me like that.

Every breath is a painful reminder that I’m still alive. That only my unabashed optimism - and really, that’s only here because I repress every single mistake I’ve ever made (which explains why I can’t really remember much) - is keeping me alive, and it feels like someday that will wane too, and leave me like everything else.

I’m still alive now though, or alive enough to write this instead of doing my work due tomorrow morning. I know I’m going to regret this, but there are moments when you do not care.

See, I’m quite apathetic like that. I can brush off anything - the death of my pet? Nah, I’ll just continue like it didn’t happen. Poor test result? What test? Intrusive thoughts telling me to stab myself? Ah, they’ll go away eventually.

Except they don’t go away - not these intrusive thoughts anyway.

Imagine if any time you made a mistake, there was a voice on your shoulder saying Stab Yourself. With a steak knife in the hand - or plunge that chef’s knife into your chest. Take that other knife and slice open your veins, and sink the last one into your throat.

With thoughts like that everyday it’s a miracle I’m still alive.

I wouldn’t really call this a life, though.

I’m just stumbling through this existence, despising every second and shooting myself in the foot at every opportunity.

Well, I don’t despise every second, or at least not while I’m living it. The good moments are enough to suppress these ones for a while - until they come back, in double the strength.

I hate this.

One day it will end.

The morbidly curious part of me wants to know whether I will be alive or dead when that happens.

Feed me crow. With a side helping of humble pie. Bird and entrails are what I deserve, garnished with an eye and a tooth or two. Just like cancer cures nicotine addiction, the wisdom of imminent death gives me a final perspective, too late to apply to my life all done and lived. I can only imagine the joy of this perspective, had it been mine before I did what made me deserve my bureaucratic fate, my legislated mortality.

Right? Wrong? It doesn’t matter on Death Row, because it’s been settled, etched in a book with the burning, hot caustic markings of my last breaths. That book is about to be closed forever and put up on a shelf, way high out of reach, to collect the same dust as the other books way high out of reach, the compendium of those who needed mortality to teach them living.

My new wisdom puts me at peace, so send me home, now that I am rehabilitated.

I flip through the sandwich, like it's an old magazine.  And then I put it down, dropping it on my tray. 

   I sigh. 

   Seriously?  It's my last meal.  You'd think they'd care enough about me to add some mayonnaise to the sandwich so I can eat the cardboard they call food, and remember my childhood with. 

   Whatever.

   Tomorrow can't come fast enough.

   Wherever I go, I hope there's mayonnaise.