Ragged edge of the universe (Part 1)

I remember a time in my life when I was completely vulnerable; I was able to love yet I was able to hurt. I had everything before me and everywhere to go. In essence, I was alive; the kind of living that one only lives when one doesn’t know how much living can hurt. I guess I somehow brought bad things upon me with my innocent stupidity. Everything that happened completely blind-sided me and left me in a state of blindness for years after. My time of innocent, my time of living without fear and regret, was over.

People in a small town hear about things pretty quickly and they aren’t hesitant to spread the news even further. I remember hearing murmurs and whispers as I passed people walking down the street.

“It was quite a tragedy,” I heard many of them say as they shook their head and looked sadly at me.

In reality, the whole event wasn’t really a tragedy. A tragedy is a child falling through a bridge or a woman walking across a train track and her shoe getting stuck. A tragedy is a shocking, horrible thing that happens to a good person. What happened was not really shocking and most definitely did not happen to a good person.

A tragedy is a rare event that’s almost impossible to duplicate. Putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger isn’t a rare event and it’s certainly not that hard to duplicate. What’s hard to duplicate is a child coming into the room at the exact same time the person pulls the trigger. That’s a pleasure held by only a lucky few; I’m one of them.

I can’t remember what I was doing before I walked into the room. Everything before it is pretty much a blur. I can remember being really excited about something, maybe it was about a book I finished or cursive letter I mastered writing. Whatever it was, my excitement came to a halt as I stepped into the room.

I knew that my father didn’t have a great life and when I saw the gun to his head, deep down, I wasn’t surprised. I was quite young, however, and I didn’t really understand what was happening at first. I saw him sitting on his bed with a stupid smirk on his face. The next second, I heard the gunshot. I didn’t see the actual shot; I mean I know I did, but I’ve subconsciously blocked it out. This talent of blocking things out has probably been the sole reason preventing me from putting a bullet in my own head.

The weeks following the shooting were filled with visits from counselors and therapists. I can remember, even as a kid, I didn’t completely trust any of them. When a kid is let down so often, she begins to lose her trusting ability. These strangers, all with fake smiles on their faces, meant absolutely nothing to me and what they told me meant even less. Their attempts at comforting me weren’t as successful as any of them expected. I was that one kid that no PhD could fix and the only other method was putting me on medication.

I took the medication until I was fifteen when I realized that the meds were causing me to just float through life. I realized this when a classmate asked me what my favorite movie was and the only movie that came to my head was The Little Mermaid, which I hadn’t seen since I was seven. I had no recent favorite movie because I didn’t care enough about anything to put any one thing above another. At any given moment in my life I was always at the ragged edge of the universe, not really living, but rather just existing.