99 Times

8 times in March 2024. I stood near the edge. Not the kind people talk about over coffee, but the real one. The kind you walk to barefoot in the middle of the night when the world is so quiet it sounds like screams in your head. I didn’t leave a note. I didn’t plan a goodbye. I just didn’t want to keep breathing. That was all. The sky was the same every time. Grey. Still. Nothing changed.

11 times in April. I got used to the routine. Morning coffee. Pretending. Smiling when people spoke. Nodding as if the words reached me. And then, when the world wasn’t looking, my hands would ache to let go, like they weren’t even mine.

May had 29. That was the month my heart was torn out in the messiest but cleanest way. Not with a knife, but with silence. With the way someone I had loved looked at me like I was dirt and was already fading. I think that month I stopped trying to pretend. I stopped eating, sleeping, hoping. Just numbers on the wall. Just breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, stop.

June had 3. I don’t remember them clearly. They didn’t burn like May. Just flickers. Like matches that wouldn’t catch a flame.

2 in July. One was at the bottom of a swimming pool. The other was in the middle of a Walmart aisle next to the milk. I remember thinking: Is this what it’s come to? Thinking about vanishing between 2% and whole milk?

August held 2. Quieter ones. Gentle, strangely polite. Just the idea of disappearing like smoke through a cracked window. Not angry. Just done.

1 in September. I was proud of that. A low number. I still felt hollow, but I was walking more. Breathing more. Lying less.

October had 2. That month was colder. I kept staring at the trees, thinking about how leaves don’t scream when they let go.

2 in November. I sat in church both times, ironically enough. One during the sermon. One while singing on stage during worship. I wondered if God noticed when I stopped singing and just reached my hands out to Him. If He knew I was somewhere else entirely.

5 in December. The holidays are a knife dressed in ribbons. I smiled in every photo. Every single one.

January had 9. That month is always heavy. The world starts over, but I never do. I just carry all the months before.

February had 9 too. And I hated myself for it. I had made it this far, hadn’t I? Why wasn’t it easier yet?

March again. 11 times. Full circle. I started keeping score in my head. Not to glorify it—just to remember that I was still here. Still fighting. Still aching.

April had 5.

And then suddenly on a random Thursday night—there was you.

You didn’t rescue me. Don’t flatter yourself. You didn’t say the right thing or shine light into the dark. You just stayed. You just didn’t leave. You asked questions no one else dared to. You listened without turning away. You didn’t try to paint over the cracks—you looked straight through them.

And the ache

didn’t disappear

but it loosened its grip.

So I stayed.

Ninety-nine times I almost didn’t.

But you were the reason I never made it to one hundred.