3:00, and she is awake again. She couldn’t sleep, she has been restless. Hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold. A cold sweat has broken out on her forehead as she throws the covers off of herself. Her stomach is doing a conglomeration of flips, back flips, side flips, front flips, somersaults, cartwheels, and more flips. She thinks she is going to be sick. She fumbles through the pitch black halls into the bathroom, flips on the light switch and hunches over the toilet. She pulls her greasy, brown split ends back from her face into a messy bun and waits. Her head is pounding, it’s always pounding. The pain killers never do any good. She constantly worries that there is something worse wrong with her since she is never 100% healthy. She keeps waiting. Nothing comes out except for dry heaves and dry sobs. An anxiety attack; Jamie was having another anxiety attack. 
Slowly dragging her feet back up under her, she pulls herself together and stands before the bathroom mirror. The face staring back at her does not reflect the girl she once knew. Jamie started high school with such promise. She attended a public school and didn’t experience the trouble that most other insecure freshmen suffered. Jamie was confident in the girl that she was, surrounded by both new and old friends. Ready to move on, discover herself, and find her calling, she always had a plan. Her friends described her as ambitious and clever, but still capable of a goofy and spontaneous side. High grades, club involvement, star point guard of the JV basketball team as a freshman, her parents couldn’t have been more proud of her. Jamie was beautiful, boys swooned over her, friends reached out to her, and adults praised her. Jamie had a lot going for her. Now looking at her face in the mirror, where full, rosy cheeks had once sat, now shallow, colorless cheeks lay sunken in. Her eyes used to be a hazel brown filled with an energetic light of hope. Instead, tired, dark, expressionless pupils stared back at her. Jamie looks like she has aged 30 years in the time period of just one year.
Rubbing her cheeks, they feel more like rubber than skin beneath her hands. Nothing feels real anymore. Pulling her shorts up, she peers down at the scars that run jagged along her upper thigh. She trails her finger over them and feels their rough texture as she traces their paths, finding that they just lead to the next scar; an endless cycle. She had thought that cutting herself would make the pain feel tangible. However, she had grown so numb to life that the blade never hurt. Nothing hurt. Nothing felt nice. Nothing. Rolling her shorts back down, Jamie feels herself growing too hot again. She wouldn’t be surprised if she fogs the bathroom mirror up, she might as well just evaporate right then and there. If she could have any super power, she always believes she would choose the ability to evaporate and disappear from scenes. There were a lot of scenes that Jamie felt desperate to escape from, including the ones that finally sent her over the edge. That was her sophomore year. Sports failed, grades failed, friends failed, family failed, love failed, Jamie failed. 
There’s a sudden urge to escape and a need to feel the fresh air surge through her veins. Jamie throws her tattered grey sweatpants on and zips her black jacket up. She digs through her pile of anonymous objects that coats her bedroom floor to find her already-tied pair of converse and slips them on. Jamie tiptoes down the dark hallway and pauses at her little sister, Lillian’s door. She places her hands on the wooden frame and peers into the room, studying her sister’s small frame curled up under the sheets. There’s a faint smile plastered on her delicate, peaceful face. Lillian is still too innocent and full of life and promise to know the struggles in the world. There’s still hope for Lillian and Jamie feels a small pang of jealousy in her chest. She loves her sister though, she really does. Lillian will grow up to be a beautiful person.
Next, Jamie hesitates outside of her parents’ bedroom door. They lay together in bed, her dad’s arm hugging her mom and her mom’s hand holding her dad’s. There is so much love in this simple scene, so much love that Jamie fears she will never find. Her parents have worked so hard to help her, to understand her. They have been the most supportive people in the world. They have invested countless hours into her health and happiness. They are good parents. They are also strict parents. Sometimes Jamie feels smothered by all their attention and critiquing eyes and ears. They always seem to be analyzing and taking note of her tendencies. Expectations and standards are kept so high for Jamie that she feels she can never quite meet that desired mark. She’s a failure to her parents. They could be a better husband and wife if Jamie didn’t cause them so much stress. She feels as though it’s her fault when they get into arguments over her because she can never seem to do anything right anymore. She turns away from their room and continues down the steps to the front door.  
After slowly creaking the door open and pulling it back shut for what felt like hours, Jamie breathes in a sigh of relief as she inhales the fresh, outdoor air. Free at last. She isn’t quite sure where she wants to go yet so she picks a direction and starts walking. The streets are deserted; the town has turned into a graveyard with headstones lining the roads reading directions. The ghoulish lighting and the impending storm weather in the early morning hours create a grayish hue over the buildings. The speed limit signs might was well read “R.I.P. 45 mph.” There is still a faint glow from the streetlights above, but the saturated yellow is overpowered by the dreary gray. Bitter winds bite through the thin layers of fleece and cotton that line her skin and Jamie zips her jacket all the way up her neck like a dork. She hugs her arms tighter around her flat stomach and protruding rib cage. This would have been one of those times it would have been a perk to be fat for once and pack on a few extra pounds of insulation. In this moment Jamie regrets not having the motivation to eat regular meals like a normal person should. A normal person, unlike herself.
Arms hugged tight around her torso, kicking up dust and small rocks with each dragging step, Jamie approaches a bridge. It’s a beautiful stone structure, faded, sandy-colored, giant, square-shaped stones abstractly stack together to form the outer structure of it while simple gray pavement lines the inside for cars to travel by, but in this case, for Jamie to travel by on foot. This bridge is arched over a river running through the city. With her hair whipping in the wind, the water roars beneath her and she can hear the dark waves lapping against the stones, expanding out, then being sucked back down to the core of the river again. The waves feel like her thoughts. When she gets troubled, an immense mass of internal words and images lashes out in her head, and then just as quickly is sucked back down into the hidden recesses of her brain where it lurks silently until it resurfaces and the cycle repeats itself. Being surrounded by stone, she feels entrapped once again, imagining the stones closing in on her, squeezing the air from her lungs. Feeling another anxiety attack clenching her soul, there is the desperate need to find higher ground and gasp upward for the fresh air.
She places her hands on the chilled stone and hoists herself up onto the ledge. It is just wide enough that she can fully sit on it and feel balanced. Her feet dangle over the edge and Jamie envisions herself floating on air above the real world, above her fears. Jamie always seeks an escape, the sudden impulse to tear herself out of the present page of life’s book. So many instances she wants to run; run away from classes, embarrassing moments, lectures, fights, arguments, and her own confusion. This moment feels perfect. Her mind is a blank slate and the wind whisks away all her worries. Jamie is in a different dimension, levitated by magical winds, floating above the word, floating above her thoughts. If time were to freeze at this very moment, it would be the perfect picture. She wishes she could live in this moment forever, but her thoughts once again clog her arteries. Drawing herself back to reality, the cold easily seeps through her thin, gray sweatpants and she laughs at the idea of having to get her butt amputated. Then she wonders why she’s laughing to herself, all alone, on a deserted bridge. Jamie doesn’t mind though, nothing seems to faze her anymore at this point. Nothing bothers her; it should bother her that nothing bothers her, but it doesn’t.
Most girls at her age would not want to be seen out and about with greasy, messy hair, no makeup, and sloppy clothes, but Jamie doesn’t care. Most girls would complain about being cold and being up so early and want to go back to their warm bed, but Jamie doesn’t mind. Actually, the only thing she minds is her mind. She thinks faster than she can breathe. There are more thoughts in her head than oxygen in her lungs. Her thoughts are changing just as quickly as she’s kicking her legs over the air. Left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg, happy thought, sad thought, left leg, right leg, success, regret, left leg, right leg.
The pills never work, they never do. One year of being on medication and I still proceed on with my dark meditation. There is no solution, my mind is a wasteland coated in pollution. Society is full of corruption. At this rate I should be admitted into a mental institution. But that is not the desired solution. There has to be a higher constitution.         
When Jamie gets really depressed she tends to think or write in rhymes, it brings her a small sliver of peace. However, her inspirations only come in morbid topics and are purely spontaneous, they cannot be prompted. Her teachers, parents, and friends question her sanity and wonder what possesses her to write such bleak material. Feeling scrutinized under their concerns, Jamie tends to keep these thoughts and ideas private. Whenever anyone gets too close to her, she retreats back to the shadows of safety. She has pushed so many good people away from her. Especially since the one incident that stripped away the last straw from her mental endurance. So many bad things had been progressively building up, but this turn of events threw her from the peak into a downward slide. She feels her stomach dropping along with her heart and holds back the bitter taste in her mouth.
Vomit… There’s nothing suitable that rhymes with vomit. Comet? No. It cannot be glorified to such a heavenly extent. That is, if heaven even exists. If heaven exists, I wish to find it now. I cannot wait for judgment day, I feel as if I have already received enough judging from my peers, so why can’t the day be today. God, I am ready. Come and strike me down and lift me into your arms. Send me soaring on a pure, white dove up to your golden gates. Take me where I belong, because it sure as hell is not here, or maybe I already am in hell. Hell if I know. If lightning were to sizzle me like bacon on the spot, if an earthquake were to break the very ground beneath and deposit me into the earth’s core, if a tornado were to swirl overhead and suck my life into its vortex, I would not mind. I am completely at peace with the concept of death. I welcome death, but it does not ever come knocking at my door to pay me a visit, just like no one else ever comes knocking at my door to pay me a visit.
I get so lonely while simultaneously smothered. I want to break away but I also want to find a way. No, no, there is no way. Things have changed, there is no going back. There is no way. Nothing is the way it used to be. In that time I had friends, so many friends. Boys liked me, yes even hot boys, I was pretty, I was confident, and I was desirable. My grades were just as promising as my love life. Now there is no promise in any aspect of me. My friends, my so many friends, boys, so many attractive boys helped convince me of that. I chose “the path less traveled by” and you know where it got me? Nowhere because no one else was dumb enough to travel that path so I ended up in isolation on a s***ty route that lead me here. I chose to stand by society’s leper, the school loser. I knew it was the honorable thing to do, yet it brought me no honor from my peers. I became society’s second leper, the school loser’s friend.
I had dug myself my own grave at the start of the second quarter of my sophomore year. My friends abandoned me. They started their own interests that didn’t intrigue me and left me excluded. Because I didn’t agree with their decisions, I was considered out of the option. Dirty looks started to become my daily diet. Bullies became my most frequent acquaintances. I lost my confidence along with my weight. I went to a party, tried to drink my body weight back in ounces of hard liquor and tried to drink my mind full of sense in prescribed shots of vodka. Instead I lost my mind, along with my household privileges and my spot on the varsity basketball team. There are two sets of three letters that go along together in perfection like black and black: R.I.P and M.I.P. Rumors spread like the black plague. My parents cracked down on me like never before, so disappointed in me it made me hate myself. It also made me hate my home. My house was no longer a safe haven. I was now under constant supervision and pressure. I didn’t feel safe at school and now I felt uneasy in my own home. I was even further isolated at school and even further supervised at home. I broke under the pressure just like my straight A’s broke into D’s. If you added another D to that expression it would make ADD, a condition I am almost positive I also suffer from. I lost who I thought were my friends, my favorite sport, my scholarly excellence, my parents’ trust, my privileges, and my happiness.
I lost myself. I’m stranded on that forsaken path less traveled by. I don’t know who I am. My name is Jamie. I am 16 years old. I look like s***. My butt is completely numb just like my emotions. It’s a shame emotions cannot be amputated. I lack any and all motivation. There is nothing for me in this world. I have lost all sense of direction, so I will just stay rooted here until death knocks me from my pedestal.
It’s a Tuesday morning; the hour of school is approaching far too soon. It is the fall season of her junior year of high school. Jamie is just slightly over half-way through her 4 years before college. They always say that the half-way point of a race is the most difficult to push through and it is evident that the fatigue has been weighing down on her soul. Jamie’s present state of life consists only of school, working at the grocery store, doing homework, plans on extremely rare occasions, eating a little, thinking, sleeping, and thinking. Jamie’s thoughts continue to fluctuate along with her swaying legs.
I have no friends.
I’ve pushed away everyone who wants to be my friend.
My friends abandoned me.
They were not truly my friends.
I screwed myself over.
I know I did the right thing.
There is nowhere that I fit in.
I am unique, I am myself.
I am ugly.
I’m just paranoid.
I am dumb, I will go nowhere in life with these grades.
I’m not putting my full effort into the subjects.
I am lazy.
I have not set a goal to meet.
I have no potential.
I don’t apply myself.
I have a criminal record.
I have a story to teach people from.
I am the reason my parents fight.
They have their own bigger reasons to dispute.
My parents place too much pressure on my shoulders.
They believe in me.
I am a terrible example for Lillian.
She still loves and looks up to me.
He only wants to try to get in my pants.
I’m strong enough to say no.
He broke my heart.
I know I have felt love.
He played me like I was a videogame.
I’m mature enough to know life is not a game.
(Well technically LIFE is a board game.)  
I am numb, I have no feelings.
My soul is just afraid and lies dormant.
People mistake me for a child.
I will look great at the age of 60.
I don’t know what I want to be.
There is still time to figure it out.
I don’t know what I believe.
There has to be a reason to life.
People are so cruel.
They are suffering from their own struggles.
I want to die.
That’s the coward’s escape.
I am a coward.
I once stood against the odds.
The odds are never in my favor.
Luck is what you make of it.
I want to die.
I want to live.
I want to die.
I want to live.
I want…
With that last thought, Jamie closes her eyes and hurls herself from the ledge of the bridge. The wind whips fast around her airborne body until there is a sudden smack. However, she did not fall far. Jamie opens her eyes to see herself lying on the pavement of the bridge, safe from the water stampeding and rushing beneath it. The hip and the elbow on her left side throb, sending a pain surging through her body. She is in pain. Pain has never been so pleasing. She actually feels something. She feels something the razor blade could never give her. Heart pumping quickly, adrenaline rushes through her veins.
I want. I actually want. I want something. I want to do something. I want to be something. I want. I was certain I would throw myself into the river but I instead wanted to throw myself onto the cement. So by transitive property, I wanted to scrape up my knees and elbows, damn it I’m dumb. I wanted to live. I do want to live. I want. It’s crazy how one simple word can change one’s perspective. Instead of worrying about how I can make myself happy, I can worry about how I can help make others happy. That in itself would make me happy. I can’t always control how I feel, but I can control how I make others feel. I was looking at life through a bleak perspective, seeing only the bad that I wanted to see. My perspective was cynical and negative. What about the good? I’ve neglected and divorced the good. My mind was the bad. My mind tinted the windows of my eyes and darkened the sight of life. I think too much. I focus on all of the questions that cannot be answered, the concepts that cannot be reasoned. I spend too much time interrogating the final outcome and greater purpose to life, wasting time to enjoy the present. Don’t the sayings go, “there’s no time like the present”?
I need to relinquish my doubts over to God and trust in faith. I believe in one God, the Father the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible… There are so many times I have recited this creed without defining the words. I believe that there is so much unknown about this world. The only thing I do know is that I have faith in God and I have to trust in that faith. He placed me into this world of the unknown, only so that one day in the far future I will know. That time has not come yet though. When that time comes, only God will know, it is not my job to decide when that day will be. Until then, it is my job to live in His name. I feel as though it was the hand of God and the breath of the Holy Spirit that carried and blew my direction of decent back onto the pavement of this bridge. I still have a purpose in this world, I am not finished serving my time here on earth. I have neglected my faith far too long. One needs to have faith to live a happy life.
I spend far too much time thinking and not enough time doing. I think about why I am unhappy instead of doing what makes me happy. What makes me happy? I like food, I like boys, I like playing basketball, I like studying, I like drawing, I like taking creative pictures, I like helping people, I like my family, I like reading, I like collecting coins, I like working out, I like carrots, I like watermelon, I like the color orange, I like bendy straws, I like the smell of lavender, I like the smell of brownies, I like the sound of birds chirping, I like the sound of wind chimes, I like the feeling of the sun beating down on my skin, I like the feeling of water rushing by me as I dive into a pool, I like romantic comedies, I like high heels, I like myself, just not my present self. I once liked myself, I am capable of liking myself again, but I have some work to do. I will like myself.
There are so many verbs I have erased from my dictionary. Laugh, smile, kick, throw, run, swim, talk, sing, dance, play, dribble, pass, help, assist, bake, cook, create, draw, write, read, invent, inspire, achieve, study, shop, twirl, kiss, hug, work, lift, collect, attempt, try… especially try. I lost my will to try. Now there are so many things coming to mind that I want to try.
Ride a unicycle,
Paint a self-portrait,
Learn a different language,
Earn a promotion,
Go skiing,
Go on a date,
Go on two dates,
Go on three dates,
Fall in love,
Fall off a plane,
Pull open a parachute,
Dress myself up,
Try out for another basketball team,
Go out for track,
Write a song,
Sing the song,
Produce the song,
Get a scholarship,
Make honor roll,
Find good friends,
Stay with the friends,
Do the splits,
Try to get up from the splits,
Crash a wedding,
Crash a bumper car,
Go camping,
Go on a hike,
Climb a tree,
Attempt to get down from the tree,
Go skinny dipping,
Go streaking,
Jump a fence,
Pet a squirrel,
Get rabies,
Recover from rabies,
Make my parents proud,
Teach my sister,
Tell my sister to do as I say, not as I do,
Dress like a clown in a grocery store,
Kiss a boy,
Make out with a boy,
Go to church,
Sing on a street corner,
Gain 40 pounds,
Lose 40 pounds,
Scream at the top of my lungs,
Stand up to my bullies,
Speak up for what I believe in,
Have confidence,
Go to college,
Get a career,
Marry a man,
Have a family,
Grow old,
Take advantage of my senior discounts,
Wave my cane at people,
Have grandkids,
Spoil my grandkids,
Die at peace in God’s arms,
Be myself,
Try.
There are things that I want; there are things that I want to try. Want. Try. Believe. These three verbs are the verbs I want to live by. These three verbs have provided me a new perspective, a new point of view. Who cares what other people think? I think enough as it is. I don’t want to think about what I will be; I want to be what I choose to be. More than anything right now, I want to take a shower.
Still sitting on the bridge, Jamie snaps her head up and regains focus as she sees lights flashing in the distance. They draw nearer and blue and red lights illuminate her eyes and wailing sirens fill her ears. The black and white vehicles come to a screeching stop and the doors fly open, producing her mother, father, and Lillian clutching her mother’s leg. They’re a mess in pajamas, hair uncombed, slippers on their feet, eyes red with tears, faces pale with expectant fears. Jamie had forgotten that she remained missing from her home and guilt flutters its wings in her stomach. To think she could have lost these three people that she holds so dear and whom hold her even dearer. Her joints burn and throb as she rises to her feet, but she doesn’t care. She runs to her family with a slight hobble and is enveloped in a sea of arms and sobs. Jamie has never felt so much love as she does in this one moment and she feels a warm tear slipping down her cheek for the first time in a year.