Painkillers.

I wasn’t happy.

It was as simple as that.

No complications, no explanations, no need for specifics; I just wasn’t a happy person.

My days are spent knocked out and pumped to the rim with some form of anti-depressant: Alprazolam; Prozac; Venlafaxine; Duloxentine; Mirtazapine; Nefazodone.

One how-ever-many-fucking-syllable-letter word after the fucking other. You name it, I’ve probably had it prescribed. All lining the shelf in my bathroom; a Technicolor wonderland. Orange, blue, green, red and everything in between.

And all because the psychiatrist can’t be bothered to diagnose me properly.

“How have you been?” He'd ask.

“I’ve been better,”

“You’ve been sad?”

“Yes,”

“Well, here, take these, three times a day, they’ll make you happy in no time,” I half expect him to use his fingers as quote marks any time he says that bullshit five lettered H-word.

And then he’ll hand me another little bottle that rattles when I hold it in my palm, the outlined silhouettes of the 30-something pills falling about in the orange tinted bottle.

And it drowns me. Over and over again it drowns me. Every single rainbow-ed pill that comes from the bottle on my shelf fills up my insides with so much crap that it doesn’t seem possible that my lungs can move and my heart can beat.

I’m just waiting for the day that the powders inside those rainbow fucking capsules really start to dissolve, and start to disintegrate me from the inside out. Travelling through my blood stream until they reach my brain in overloaded amounts where it’ll hopefully shut down.

All these pills, and I’m still sad.

Have I ever thought about ending it? Of course I have.

There was this one time, where I chased every single Technicolor tablet down my throat and into my stomach with a bottle or two of Vodka. And I loved every fucking second of it. Every single second that I was sprawled across the kitchen floor, laughing in euphoria and singing about nothing.

The darkness swam, it fucking swam around my eyeballs until I was seeing a pin prick of light and nothing else. In that one pin prick of light, I could see only the fridge. I’ll never know why that was such a significant memory; I was well and truly fucked up that night.

All of a sudden, I was in a bubble, swimming and laughing and dreaming. I could hear yelling, panicked voices, my mother crying, but it was far away. So fucking far away that it didn’t even feel real any more.
The abnormality of cold metal plates being placed on my chest made me jump, but then electricity was surging through my body, attacking every nerve until it tingled and I smiled. I fucking smiled.

They sent me to my psychiatrist a week later. And what did he do?

He prescribed me some more pills; the very thing that almost killed me.

Another colour of the rainbow to add to my little Technicolor wonderland. And I still wasn’t happy.

There was another time, when I was standing on this bridge. Those grimy industrial types, the paint cracking and for some reason revealing an awful green colour. It never seemed like there was a point to painting it.

I’d looked intently at the water below me intent on jumping, but I was so fucked up on those pretty little pills that I got distracted.

The stars were so bright that night, and the water, it was so shiny. The current was making it splash around so much more dramatically, and the colours just kept me amused. It was supposed to be blue; but it was brown. What the fuck is with that?

I’d been so distracted... giggling and talking to the stars, that I never noticed the police drive along the road towards me, sirens blaring. I was so fucked up, that I thought it was just something to sing along to.

“Step away from the bridge, sir!” One of the officers yelled. And I outright laughed, bold and amused. They’d called me sir; I’m eighteen years old.

My arms outstretched like I was crucified on some invisible cross, being punished for my sins and the sins of so many others that it almost didn’t seem fair anymore. I laughed when they’d dragged me over the fencing, and pushed me into an ambulance. They soothed me in there, told me everything was going to be okay, but no, no it wasn’t, because as soon as they sent me back to my psychiatrist I was handed another foil packet of pills.

And I still wasn’t happy!

And now, I was sat in my room, turning a metal device over in my hands, examining every crevice carved into the outside. I thrived on the chill that it gave me, it felt like electricity on my fingertips, and it made me feel alive.

It’s ironic that, the way that you feel the most alive you’ve ever felt in your nearest moments to death.

The adrenaline...it makes me happier than any of that Technicolor shit that just eats me alive from the inside out.

Standing from my bed, with my next weapon of choice, I skipped into the bathroom, examining my shelves. Running my fingers across the Technicolor bottles, I just wanted them all to smash and break; to bleed on to the floor in toxic rainbow rivers, that’d poison anything around it, killing instantly.

In my mind...no matter how morbid; that vision – of the toxic rivers...and the death...it was so beautiful. Far better than all those established works of art you can find in those shitty museums all around the world.

Usually, what is beautiful in the eyes of the creator never really lives up to expectations in the eyes of the critic.

Above the sink, a mirror hung. The man staring back at me sneering at me...jeering and laughing. Taunting me and tempting me and daring me.

In one swift movement, I put the gun to my head, and I smiled.