Little rows of pills, lying in their tightly-sealed foil casings, waiting to send you off to sleep. For how long, though? Hours? Days? Years? Eternity.
It’s the coward’s way out, isn’t it? No pain, no difficulty, just swallow a load of drugs and there you go. Gone. It’s not dramatic. Not even particularly attractive. With blood, there’s drama and gruesome beauty in the bright, deep red. Jumping off a building, or hanging yourself, or most others of the hundreds of ways to do this, too, show courage. Grace. Complete and utter determination to end your sorry existance.
But I’ve always taken the coward’s way. I could never stand up for myself, choosing to simply sit back and watch everything slowly crumble, hoping it might fix itself. I cling to those who can be strong. It’s how I get by.
But what happens when they, the ones you clutch at for support, are the ones who betray you?

I wonder- what will I look like when they find me? Will these pills be instant? Will someone walk in here to find my limp corpse sprawled unappealingly on the bathroom floor? Or will I have time to go into the bedroom, perhaps lie myself in a suitably suicidal position. Heart-wrenching, but graceful. Tragedy with style.
Will there be something in the newspaper? Maybe people will read about me, that poor, rotting corpse that was once the living, breathing remains of a broken heart. Perhaps I’ll be the subject of a few commiserations and shakes of the head, and then people will turn the page and go back to sipping their coffee.
People care when there’s nothing they can or have to do about it.

The casing makes a slight snapping sound as I pop pill after pill from the airtight packaging.

One, snap, two, snap.

I loved him. He was my life, my soul, my happiness, my sadness, every single thing that could touch me, help me, hurt me... Was embodied in him. He never felt that way about me though. Maybe he loved me, for a while. Maybe he didn’t. Either way, he doesn’t now. And hasn’t for a long time.
I think he liked the fact that I needed him. It wasn’t the leeching, spend-his-money-because-I’m-too-lazy-to-make-a-living-myself need. I could handle material life perfectly fine. But me, the part of my body, or soul, or whatever that made my body me, and not a walking, talking lump of flesh and bone- it needed him. He owned it, from the moment I saw him. And even now. Now, when he’s gone. When he’s holding someone else’s soul, he’s never given me back mine.
Maybe he doesn’t own this new person’s soul. Maybe they own his, in a way I never could. A way that made him forget about that fragile, pathetic part of me he was sheilding, nurturing, letting rely upon him.
It’s never going to go away. He’s always going to have me, whether he wants me or not. I don’t want to be his anymore. I want to be like him, and move on. Move on, forget, and let someone else have my love and soul.
But I can’t. I’ll never stop hurting until the day I die. This is a contract that I blindly signed when I fell in love with him. But there’s a loophole, as there always is.
Until the day I die.

Three, snap, four, snap, five, snap.

I hate pills. The feeling of something hard brushing against your tongue, swallowing this foreign object whole, even with water, has always made me wretch. I’ve never been able to swallow pills, and whenever I try for whatever reason- sickness, sleeplessness, nutritional needs- it always ends with pointless, uninvited tears running down pathetically down my cheeks, and myself whimpering and wishing that there was some other way. There always is, though- I let my body fight the sickness by itself, or I endure the insomnia until it goes away, or I forget about the whole idea of being ideally healthy.
But this time, there is no other way. No alternative method of getting around this pain. So I manage it. Force myself to it, and I tell myself that the only way I’m going to get through this need is to keep on swallowing. Tears don’t run down my cheeks now, because I’m achieving my goal.
As I snap them from their little foil casings, I take them with the glass of water I’m constantly refilling at the bathroom tap in front of me. I do all this without looking in the mirror, because I know if I look at myself, the tears will come, and then I won’t be able to keep on swallowing. I have to end this. I have to get me, my soul, myself... Back. From him.