SUICIDE
(ctto)
No Copyright infringement Intended.I just want to share that might can help others.
I saw it on FB PAGE:PAPEL
#shortstoryPAPEL
Silent Killer
by 42
011017 | 1600
“Suicide is more than just killing yourself,” our new substitute Psychology professor said as she flashed an image of a boy who hung himself on the ceiling on the projector. “Suicide is not some sick disease in the mind. It’s not simply you want to get a gun and point it on your head, it’s not just getting that blade under your pillow and then cut your already scarred wrist, it’s not just about taking out the rope you hid under your bed since you were thirteen then hang yourself on the ceiling of your bedroom, while your parents continued fighting inside their room, unconscious of the fact that their son or daughter had already lost his battle. Suicide is an example of how someone experienced the worst pain to the point that it was easy for him to end the life he never wanted, the life that he didn’t choose for himself, the life that made him… him.”
It was the third week of November, and we were in the middle of our first meeting with our new substitute Psychology professor. I didn’t know what to expect about her, she looked like she was just one of the typical college students you can see in every university. She was wearing a white statement shirt saying Fuck Life and a dark blue rugged jeans. More than that, there was nothing unusual about her, except for the semi-colon tattoo on her wrist, which you would hardly notice unless you look at it clearly. Most of the time, professors bore me, but this one is different. She was just cool, the way she talked was as if she was just talking to her closest friends and not her students. She didn’t even introduced herself like what other professors do, instead, she closed the lights and opened up the projector in the function room the moment we got inside. And she looked at us before saying, “Ready to get fucked up?”
“When you hear the word suicide, what’s the first thing that comes into your mind? Some of you may answer death, killing oneself, taking his own life, and other answers that will make suicide look like a simple word. Then there was one time I was invited to some Kindergarten school by a friend who was teaching there, and I talked about suicide. Maybe some people will tell me that I was insane for doing such, for opening up a sensitive topic to kids ages four, knowing for a fact that they’re just a bunch of kids who are unaware of the fucked up world, and eats dirt. But when I flashed them the same image you can see, they all looked at one student at the back. So I asked them the same question, what’s the first thing that comes into their minds, and they all said one thing. That kid’s name—Jake. So it made me think out of the blue, wondering what could be with that kid that he was his classmates’ first thought after seeing the image on the projector. And it surprised me when I realized why they looked at him. Because Jake was the kid on the image…”
The slide turned to the next after her fingers snapped, and the next image silenced the room.
It was the same kid on the first image, but this time, his wrist had cuts. His face was surrounded with fresh wounds, blood flowed from his bruised lips. His intense black eyes were swollen, one of his hands was bleeding, bruises covered both of his legs, and his face had some three-degree burn that melted his face until he couldn’t be recognized anymore. He was standing in front of a playground in a children’s mental institution, with a woman in a white lab coat standing behind him with a smile on her face. She was a psychologist, based on the nameplate pinned neatly on her coat. Jane Mason. Her fiery black eyes was surely staring at the camera, as if it was trying to threaten the person behind it. I didn’t know why, but this woman will give me some nightmares.
“Jake Mason was a five year old boy diagnosed with anxiety and bipolar disorder, who developed suicidal thoughts at the age of four. He was an orphan, and was taken care of his father’s sister who happened to be the psychologist in that picture. After Jake’s parents were brutally killed by an unknown murderer, his aunt took care of him. She took him to a children’s mental institution in New Jersey, and there, Jake’s condition got worse— much worse that his aunt had to lock him up in the basement of that traumatizing place. I studied his case after I met him, I went to that mental institution in New Jersey, and found out that his aunt was a fucked up psychologist who only took him to make an experiment on bipolarity. I saw documentations and recordings inside the basement, pictures and other files showing how she made his own goddamn nephew sit his ass on an electric chair and electrocuted his brain. And every time that Jake tries to fight back to his aunt, she slaps him with a file case, causing bruises or sometimes, even wounds on the kid’s face. And she shouts at him, telling him how useless he is and how he was better dead like both of his parents. How he should have just died when she burnt his face. How he never deserved to live, and that he was just a stupid boy who can’t even function normally like the other children.”
The guy in the front row playing his phone in his hands, which has been my classmate for how many months now but I never knew the name, suddenly spoke. “Then what? He wanted to kill himself because his crazy aunt told him that he deserves to die? Is he stupid? That’s bullshit.”
“Then tell me, Mister Scott,” our professor muttered as she wrote the word ‘society’ on the white board. “What reaction do you expect from a five year old who never felt his life was worth living?”
Silence reigned inside the room.
“It’s funny how people as old as you are never understood suicide. Because you think you need a big reason to even think of killing yourself, because you think that only those people who have the worst problems have the right to suicide, that only them are allowed to get a gun, a blade or a rope to end their goddamn lives. But that’s not how it works. That’s not how suicide works. We all have our own tolerance of pain, you can’t expect someone to have the same tolerance level as yours. You can never call someone weak just because he cried when he had a small wound on his knee, and you didn’t. Because you didn’t felt what he felt, because you see that pain as one small piece of shit and others saw it as something so painful. No. You are not fucking brave if you call someone a coward if he was scared of pain. You are not fucking strong if you can face your shitty life everyday and others chose to give up. No. It doesn’t make you strong. It makes you look like a weak asshole boasting how he was able to face all his problems and continue living his fucked up life and others already ended theirs. Because you have no goddamn idea how much they tried fighting before they even gave up. You have no idea, because the only thing you can see is that a person lost on a little battle. But you know what? That one problem of him that you see as small could be his lifelong problem, and that small shit problem of that person can be your living hell.”
She turned the slide of the presentation to the next, and an image of a pregnant girl about our age appeared. But the thing is, she was lying unconsciously on the cold ground, her deep brown eyes were still open. Her mouth was filled with white bubbles, with red blood coming out of it. No one in the class spoke, most especially when we saw the empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand, and the deep cuts on her pale white wrist, her fresh blood flowing on the floor.
“Why do you think did she kill herself?” our professor asked casually, as if we weren’t talking about a person who decided to suicide.
One of the girls at the back row sighed disbelievingly. “For hell’s sake, why are you even asking that? Isn’t it obvious? She got herself pregnant, and she realized she’s a disgrace to society. She got ashamed for sucking some guy’s dick so she killed herself to get away with it. The end.”
Our professor smiled, as if she already expected to hear that answer. Then she said something else that turned everyone in this room into deep silence.
“She was raped.”
She looked at the image once again and smiled, trying to remember something from the past. “Lorraine Boyle was a good friend of mine way back college days, and guess what? She was the top student of our batch with straight As on all of our subjects. That was until she’s gone missing for days, no one knew where she went. Her family was worried sick, calling everyone in school if they knew where their daughter was. A week later she showed up like nothing happened. And just when we thought everything was back to normal, I saw her cutting her wrist at the storage room of the gymnasium. I tried comforting her until she told me what happened to her, and how she was raped by none other than her own goddamn father. How he hid her for days in their basement, raping her whenever he gets the chance. How he punched her in the stomach whenever she tries to scream, how he slaps her when she tried to escape. If that isn’t torture, then I don’t know what is. She tried telling it to her mother but she said she was just making things up because of trauma for days of being gone. I tried helping her out. I stayed with her after school just to make sure she’ll be okay. I even let her stay in my place in case she doesn’t want to go home, I come with her whenever she has checkups with her doctor. Until she chose to give up.”
All of a sudden, I felt dizzy just by looking at the image.
“The fact that Miss Clarkson called her a disgrace for being pregnant is one of the main reasons why society is nothing but bullshit. It’s like you people are telling me I’m allowed to call your mothers a fucking disgrace to society because they got pregnant with judgemental brats like you who know nothing about other people except for the stupid piece of shit that society imposed on your unthinking brains. That when there are people different from you, they’re a disgrace. That when a girl got pregnant in her teenage years, she’s some fucking disgrace. And if people think differently from you, they’re assholes. Because you think you’re the basis of normality in this world, because you think people should be like you to be called people. Then I could say you are no different from people who actually killed someone. Because the moment you judge someone for being different is the moment you killed their individuality, it’s the moment you’ve killed someone’s personality, it’s when you killed a big part of that person. And that is what kills suicidal people. Because you killed a part of them that only tried to be itself.”
One of the most famous girls in the university who sat in the second row spoke out of the blue. “As if we were the ones who actually killed them. Bitch please. Those freaks killed themselves for hell’s sake.”
“They killed themselves because no one made them feel they were alive,” our professor said, studying the faces of everyone in the class. “And the moment you started to feel like dying, believe me… it never stops.”
She stood in the middle of the function room, her eyes met the gaze of everyone. No one dared to mutter a word. For the first time in our class, there was nothing but dead silence. The snowflakes started to fall on the ground outside, the temperature in the room suddenly dropped. You can feel the tension arising but no one dared to talk about it. Everything was just… quiet.
“I met a lot of suicidal people. Some were even smiling at me, telling me how their day went good. Some even waved at me, trying to cheer me up from a fucked up day, some showed off the loudest laughter. And those are the biggest lies I’ve seen in my life. I still remember how I ended up taking this goddamn course, thinking I might be able to help people who have been going through this kind of problem. I thought it was that easy. But I was wrong. It wasn’t easy. My mother took her own life while I was studying Psychology. It was probably the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. And at that moment… I thought of killing myself. Ironic, because I was studying a course that was meant to help people who wanted to kill themselves, and there I am jumping from a three hundred feet tall building but managed to live. The next thing I knew, I graduated college with a few broken bones and severe depression with the hopes that I could help other people with the same problem. A lot of people doubted if I can do it. Some laughed at me while I was in the middle of a lecture, there were students threw books at me, some left the class and called me freak when I talked to them about suicide. Like hell yeah, I’m the laughingstock of universities, but I didn’t care. Because I know that beneath those laughters and attitude are people struggling to live their everyday lives. And I tried to understand them. I tried to at least understand those people because if I didn’t, then I just wasted twenty-one years of my life for nothing.”
She looked at each and every one of us, her deep gray eyes were filled with disappointment. “But sometimes, I really wonder if I wasted my life for nothing. Because at this generation, no one seemed to care, no one seemed to give a fuck. Everyone is just too close-minded about things. Like when your friend is gay, you will start condemning that person to hell for being himself then will quote how much god loves everyone even sinners. And when there’s someone with depression seeking for help, people will tell them they can get over it, then suddenly feel sympathy towards that person after he decided to end the pain. That when you meet a pregnant teenager you’ll call her a disgrace to society, then tell her how brave of a woman she is after she overdosed herself with pills. Fucking hypocrisy. People only care when it’s too late, we only try to act when everything is over. So you’ll still wait for suicidal people to die to tell them you care? Cause all along you think suicide is just a phase anyone can get over. But no. It’s not a fucking phase. It’s not some bullshit you can get over through pills that your psychologist told you to drink. Suicide is a real thing, and you can’t stop it once it’s there. Because you’ll always get back to it, every fucking time. Cause you know your problem could be your last solution—”
“—and you’ll never know if someone is suicidal… because suicide, unlike a gun, is a silent killer.”
She turned off the projector and the lights opened in the function room. Our professor’s face became more visible than earlier. You can see a scar across her face which I didn’t notice earlier, there were deep ones on her neck as well. Some of my classmates had their eyes widen when they saw her more clearly. Her right eye was sunken into its socket, her chapped lips were bruised, as if it was already permanent on her lips, her nose wasn’t aligned and her face looked a little distorted. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was the fact that she looked familiar.
“Anyway, I’m sorry for not introducing myself earlier but I guess I owe everyone an introduction. By the way, my name is—”
Before she could say her name, chills ran through my spine. The temperature got colder and everything was more quiet. I felt dizzy, then my memory brought me back to that day again. And for the second time, I saw her crying in the rooftop of our apartment building as she begged me for forgiveness. How she was sorry for what happened. I could hear her voice in my head once again, her endless crying. How she called me that night but I told her to fuck off. How she told me she wanted to die but I didn’t listen to her. How she continuously bid me goodbye but I told her to go away. How she was scared of her father but I told her to leave me alone. How she told me she loves me, but I was so disgusted to even look at her. But she couldn’t be her.
No. It’s impossible.
Before our professor left the room, I called her using ‘her’ name.
Silence reigned inside the function room, as she stopped for a moment, staring at me blankly. And I swear, I saw her smile when I said my ex-girlfriend’s name.
“Lorraine Boyle.”
“Suicide is more than just killing yourself,” our new substitute Psychology professor said as she flashed an image of a boy who hung himself on the ceiling on the projector. “Suicide is not some sick disease in the mind. It’s not simply you want to get a gun and point it on your head, it’s not just getting that blade under your pillow and then cut your already scarred wrist, it’s not just about taking out the rope you hid under your bed since you were thirteen then hang yourself on the ceiling of your bedroom, while your parents continued fighting inside their room, unconscious of the fact that their son or daughter had already lost his battle. Suicide is an example of how someone experienced the worst pain to the point that it was easy for him to end the life he never wanted, the life that he didn’t choose for himself, the life that made him… him.”
It was the third week of November, and we were in the middle of our first meeting with our new substitute Psychology professor. I didn’t know what to expect about her, she looked like she was just one of the typical college students you can see in every university. She was wearing a white statement shirt saying Fuck Life and a dark blue rugged jeans. More than that, there was nothing unusual about her, except for the semi-colon tattoo on her wrist, which you would hardly notice unless you look at it clearly. Most of the time, professors bore me, but this one is different. She was just cool, the way she talked was as if she was just talking to her closest friends and not her students. She didn’t even introduced herself like what other professors do, instead, she closed the lights and opened up the projector in the function room the moment we got inside. And she looked at us before saying, “Ready to get fucked up?”
“When you hear the word suicide, what’s the first thing that comes into your mind? Some of you may answer death, killing oneself, taking his own life, and other answers that will make suicide look like a simple word. Then there was one time I was invited to some Kindergarten school by a friend who was teaching there, and I talked about suicide. Maybe some people will tell me that I was insane for doing such, for opening up a sensitive topic to kids ages four, knowing for a fact that they’re just a bunch of kids who are unaware of the fucked up world, and eats dirt. But when I flashed them the same image you can see, they all looked at one student at the back. So I asked them the same question, what’s the first thing that comes into their minds, and they all said one thing. That kid’s name—Jake. So it made me think out of the blue, wondering what could be with that kid that he was his classmates’ first thought after seeing the image on the projector. And it surprised me when I realized why they looked at him. Because Jake was the kid on the image…”
The slide turned to the next after her fingers snapped, and the next image silenced the room.
It was the same kid on the first image, but this time, his wrist had cuts. His face was surrounded with fresh wounds, blood flowed from his bruised lips. His intense black eyes were swollen, one of his hands was bleeding, bruises covered both of his legs, and his face had some three-degree burn that melted his face until he couldn’t be recognized anymore. He was standing in front of a playground in a children’s mental institution, with a woman in a white lab coat standing behind him with a smile on her face. She was a psychologist, based on the nameplate pinned neatly on her coat. Jane Mason. Her fiery black eyes was surely staring at the camera, as if it was trying to threaten the person behind it. I didn’t know why, but this woman will give me some nightmares.
“Jake Mason was a five year old boy diagnosed with anxiety and bipolar disorder, who developed suicidal thoughts at the age of four. He was an orphan, and was taken care of his father’s sister who happened to be the psychologist in that picture. After Jake’s parents were brutally killed by an unknown murderer, his aunt took care of him. She took him to a children’s mental institution in New Jersey, and there, Jake’s condition got worse— much worse that his aunt had to lock him up in the basement of that traumatizing place. I studied his case after I met him, I went to that mental institution in New Jersey, and found out that his aunt was a fucked up psychologist who only took him to make an experiment on bipolarity. I saw documentations and recordings inside the basement, pictures and other files showing how she made his own goddamn nephew sit his ass on an electric chair and electrocuted his brain. And every time that Jake tries to fight back to his aunt, she slaps him with a file case, causing bruises or sometimes, even wounds on the kid’s face. And she shouts at him, telling him how useless he is and how he was better dead like both of his parents. How he should have just died when she burnt his face. How he never deserved to live, and that he was just a stupid boy who can’t even function normally like the other children.”
The guy in the front row playing his phone in his hands, which has been my classmate for how many months now but I never knew the name, suddenly spoke. “Then what? He wanted to kill himself because his crazy aunt told him that he deserves to die? Is he stupid? That’s bullshit.”
“Then tell me, Mister Scott,” our professor muttered as she wrote the word ‘society’ on the white board. “What reaction do you expect from a five year old who never felt his life was worth living?”
Silence reigned inside the room.
“It’s funny how people as old as you are never understood suicide. Because you think you need a big reason to even think of killing yourself, because you think that only those people who have the worst problems have the right to suicide, that only them are allowed to get a gun, a blade or a rope to end their goddamn lives. But that’s not how it works. That’s not how suicide works. We all have our own tolerance of pain, you can’t expect someone to have the same tolerance level as yours. You can never call someone weak just because he cried when he had a small wound on his knee, and you didn’t. Because you didn’t felt what he felt, because you see that pain as one small piece of shit and others saw it as something so painful. No. You are not fucking brave if you call someone a coward if he was scared of pain. You are not fucking strong if you can face your shitty life everyday and others chose to give up. No. It doesn’t make you strong. It makes you look like a weak asshole boasting how he was able to face all his problems and continue living his fucked up life and others already ended theirs. Because you have no goddamn idea how much they tried fighting before they even gave up. You have no idea, because the only thing you can see is that a person lost on a little battle. But you know what? That one problem of him that you see as small could be his lifelong problem, and that small shit problem of that person can be your living hell.”
She turned the slide of the presentation to the next, and an image of a pregnant girl about our age appeared. But the thing is, she was lying unconsciously on the cold ground, her deep brown eyes were still open. Her mouth was filled with white bubbles, with red blood coming out of it. No one in the class spoke, most especially when we saw the empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand, and the deep cuts on her pale white wrist, her fresh blood flowing on the floor.
“Why do you think did she kill herself?” our professor asked casually, as if we weren’t talking about a person who decided to suicide.
One of the girls at the back row sighed disbelievingly. “For hell’s sake, why are you even asking that? Isn’t it obvious? She got herself pregnant, and she realized she’s a disgrace to society. She got ashamed for sucking some guy’s dick so she killed herself to get away with it. The end.”
Our professor smiled, as if she already expected to hear that answer. Then she said something else that turned everyone in this room into deep silence.
“She was raped.”
She looked at the image once again and smiled, trying to remember something from the past. “Lorraine Boyle was a good friend of mine way back college days, and guess what? She was the top student of our batch with straight As on all of our subjects. That was until she’s gone missing for days, no one knew where she went. Her family was worried sick, calling everyone in school if they knew where their daughter was. A week later she showed up like nothing happened. And just when we thought everything was back to normal, I saw her cutting her wrist at the storage room of the gymnasium. I tried comforting her until she told me what happened to her, and how she was raped by none other than her own goddamn father. How he hid her for days in their basement, raping her whenever he gets the chance. How he punched her in the stomach whenever she tries to scream, how he slaps her when she tried to escape. If that isn’t torture, then I don’t know what is. She tried telling it to her mother but she said she was just making things up because of trauma for days of being gone. I tried helping her out. I stayed with her after school just to make sure she’ll be okay. I even let her stay in my place in case she doesn’t want to go home, I come with her whenever she has checkups with her doctor. Until she chose to give up.”
All of a sudden, I felt dizzy just by looking at the image.
“The fact that Miss Clarkson called her a disgrace for being pregnant is one of the main reasons why society is nothing but bullshit. It’s like you people are telling me I’m allowed to call your mothers a fucking disgrace to society because they got pregnant with judgemental brats like you who know nothing about other people except for the stupid piece of shit that society imposed on your unthinking brains. That when there are people different from you, they’re a disgrace. That when a girl got pregnant in her teenage years, she’s some fucking disgrace. And if people think differently from you, they’re assholes. Because you think you’re the basis of normality in this world, because you think people should be like you to be called people. Then I could say you are no different from people who actually killed someone. Because the moment you judge someone for being different is the moment you killed their individuality, it’s the moment you’ve killed someone’s personality, it’s when you killed a big part of that person. And that is what kills suicidal people. Because you killed a part of them that only tried to be itself.”
One of the most famous girls in the university who sat in the second row spoke out of the blue. “As if we were the ones who actually killed them. Bitch please. Those freaks killed themselves for hell’s sake.”
“They killed themselves because no one made them feel they were alive,” our professor said, studying the faces of everyone in the class. “And the moment you started to feel like dying, believe me… it never stops.”
She stood in the middle of the function room, her eyes met the gaze of everyone. No one dared to mutter a word. For the first time in our class, there was nothing but dead silence. The snowflakes started to fall on the ground outside, the temperature in the room suddenly dropped. You can feel the tension arising but no one dared to talk about it. Everything was just… quiet.
“I met a lot of suicidal people. Some were even smiling at me, telling me how their day went good. Some even waved at me, trying to cheer me up from a fucked up day, some showed off the loudest laughter. And those are the biggest lies I’ve seen in my life. I still remember how I ended up taking this goddamn course, thinking I might be able to help people who have been going through this kind of problem. I thought it was that easy. But I was wrong. It wasn’t easy. My mother took her own life while I was studying Psychology. It was probably the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. And at that moment… I thought of killing myself. Ironic, because I was studying a course that was meant to help people who wanted to kill themselves, and there I am jumping from a three hundred feet tall building but managed to live. The next thing I knew, I graduated college with a few broken bones and severe depression with the hopes that I could help other people with the same problem. A lot of people doubted if I can do it. Some laughed at me while I was in the middle of a lecture, there were students threw books at me, some left the class and called me freak when I talked to them about suicide. Like hell yeah, I’m the laughingstock of universities, but I didn’t care. Because I know that beneath those laughters and attitude are people struggling to live their everyday lives. And I tried to understand them. I tried to at least understand those people because if I didn’t, then I just wasted twenty-one years of my life for nothing.”
She looked at each and every one of us, her deep gray eyes were filled with disappointment. “But sometimes, I really wonder if I wasted my life for nothing. Because at this generation, no one seemed to care, no one seemed to give a fuck. Everyone is just too close-minded about things. Like when your friend is gay, you will start condemning that person to hell for being himself then will quote how much god loves everyone even sinners. And when there’s someone with depression seeking for help, people will tell them they can get over it, then suddenly feel sympathy towards that person after he decided to end the pain. That when you meet a pregnant teenager you’ll call her a disgrace to society, then tell her how brave of a woman she is after she overdosed herself with pills. Fucking hypocrisy. People only care when it’s too late, we only try to act when everything is over. So you’ll still wait for suicidal people to die to tell them you care? Cause all along you think suicide is just a phase anyone can get over. But no. It’s not a fucking phase. It’s not some bullshit you can get over through pills that your psychologist told you to drink. Suicide is a real thing, and you can’t stop it once it’s there. Because you’ll always get back to it, every fucking time. Cause you know your problem could be your last solution—”
“—and you’ll never know if someone is suicidal… because suicide, unlike a gun, is a silent killer.”
She turned off the projector and the lights opened in the function room. Our professor’s face became more visible than earlier. You can see a scar across her face which I didn’t notice earlier, there were deep ones on her neck as well. Some of my classmates had their eyes widen when they saw her more clearly. Her right eye was sunken into its socket, her chapped lips were bruised, as if it was already permanent on her lips, her nose wasn’t aligned and her face looked a little distorted. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was the fact that she looked familiar.
“Anyway, I’m sorry for not introducing myself earlier but I guess I owe everyone an introduction. By the way, my name is—”
Before she could say her name, chills ran through my spine. The temperature got colder and everything was more quiet. I felt dizzy, then my memory brought me back to that day again. And for the second time, I saw her crying in the rooftop of our apartment building as she begged me for forgiveness. How she was sorry for what happened. I could hear her voice in my head once again, her endless crying. How she called me that night but I told her to fuck off. How she told me she wanted to die but I didn’t listen to her. How she continuously bid me goodbye but I told her to go away. How she was scared of her father but I told her to leave me alone. How she told me she loves me, but I was so disgusted to even look at her. But she couldn’t be her.
No. It’s impossible.
Before our professor left the room, I called her using ‘her’ name.
Silence reigned inside the function room, as she stopped for a moment, staring at me blankly. And I swear, I saw her smile when I said my ex-girlfriend’s name.
“Lorraine Boyle.”
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