My Guardian Angel

In my life, there's a lot of fighting.
It's usually between myself and my dad,who I've never gotten along with because we don't exactly see eye-to-eye like we used to. I'm certainly not 'daddy's little girl' anymore. I'm not sure exactly when it was that I fell from grace in my dad's eyes, but somehow, we don't like each other anymore.
That's not what hurts, it's our fights that'll kill me one day.
It's never physical, always verbal, and it's the little things I'mprobably oversensitive about. Like how he picked on my hair after I got it cut for the first time in years- I did Locks of Love, and went from having waist-length hair to chin-length. Or how he makes plans weeks in advance, things we used to do together, and he doesn't invite me to go along until after he makes sure I'm working and can't take the day off.
He makes no bones about liking my little brother more.
It's not that I'm not his favorite that bothers me, it's the fact that he goes out of his way to hurt me. If he gets into a fight with my mom (which is frequent), he'll do something to try to 'buy' my support, since I'm a strong ally in a 'heated debate', as he calls it. What that means is I'm a fire-spitting shrew that flies off the handle when someone finally cracks my protective, mellow shell.
This story is, in fact, about me 'flying off the handle'.

After a bad fight with my dad, I went up to my room. He didn't know I was crying, he never noticed. He didn't hear me scream into my pillow, sobbing incoherently, because I'd cranked up my music co loud- I was listening to Armor For Sleep's album 'What To Do When You Are Dead'.
And then the gears in my head started turning.
The tears were still coursing down my face, but I didn't really notice them anymore, I was too busy staring at the scar running up the side of my forearm- the one my parents believed was from me falling out of a tree. My mom believed that story because she would accept anything, no matter how implausible, to be able to convince herself there's nothing wrong with her baby girl.
Don't worry, mommy, I'm not crazy.
Dad hadn't noticed the scar, even when it was a fresh gash with bright white guaze on it, and I walked around in a tshirt. At school, only one teacher noticed, he started talking to me, and we had book discussion, and I convinced him to be the advisor for my chess club.
But that scar isn't part of this story.

I was staring at the scar, still crying, Ben Jorgenson's voice ringing through my room, "Believe the news, I'm gone for good, Call off the search, no one will know that I'm down here..."
That was when it hit me. My solution.
A way to end the pain, the fights, even my masochistic cutting. I'd been so good, right up until that night. Six months of hard, stressful trials, all falling to ashes with just one fight.
I patched up the blood, my plan set in stone in my mind, and got bust while I waited for my parents to go to sleep.
I started writing letters, to each of my parents, my brother, and three of my best friends. I wrote a general goodbye, too, as well as a poem. I wrote horrible things for my dad, I told him to blame himself. I'm a horrible person, and I know that, but I wanted to hurt him like he'd hurt me so many times before. This was the only way I knew how, if I wouldn't be around long enough to make him realize what he'd done.
After my goodbyes were written, even a 'swan song', a final poem, just for my dad's enjoyment, I crept downstairs quietly, into the kitchen, past my sleeping dog. I kissed his nose, said goodbye. I'd made sure to tell my brother and my mom that I loved them, when they poked their heads into my room to say goodnight as I was writing.
Dad hadn't said goodnight to me.
I'd stopped crying, when I'd written out the goodbyes. They allowed me to... let go. I felt so peaceful, tucking them neatly into envelopes that I would clutch in my hand before closing my eyes, one more time. I felt, for the first time in my life, then sensation of a weight being lifted off my shoulders.
I always thought it was an exxageration, a metaphor, but I was wrong... I felt so free, so peaceful. I can't describe the feeling of peace. I'd never felt that way before, and I haven't felt that way since.
After I kissed my dog, smiling a quick farewell, I went to my dad's bag of medication on the counter- he'dbeen diagnosed with Guillian Barre Syndrome back in April, only three days after his father's (my grandfather's) funeral.
Now he had a large bag full of different kinds of neatly marked painkillers and antibiotics.
So many beautiful, colorful pills. The blue ones are my favorite.
I took a large scoop of the blue ones (whose name I won't reveal), and carried them up to my bedroom, where Armor For Sleep was still playing softly. "You better believe that this was all just a joke to me..."
I closed my eyes, smiling as I listened to the words, until my iPod glitched. It had been doing that a lot recently, since I almost never downloaded new software for it. As usual, it skipped right out of the playlist and pulled up a random song; or in this case, a music video I'd recently gotten hold of.
I paused, not recognizing the song for a moment, until I heard the vocals.
I froze in place, waiting to hear what I knew was coming, the chorus of the as-of-yet untitled song.
"Would you stay right here when I tell you someone out there loves you? If you stay right here, then I'll tell you that someone out there loves you after all..."
I couldn't move, I could barely breathe, but somehow I could cry. The tears truly felt as if they were burning down my face, even though it didn't occur to me I was crying. I could only hear the words, and listened, right up until the end; "Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me, stay with me, stay with me, stay..."
It was the untitled track by My Chemical Romance, the song I (like everyone else) had temporarily dubbed 'Stay'.
I stared at my iPod for a moment, then the bright blue pills in my hand.
The next morning, there weren't any pills missing from my dad's bag, and I woke up to the sound of My Chemical Romance.
My guardian angel had convinced me to Stay.