It sits under his bed. Pale,dusty and forlorn. When you hold it, you can smell him. Lemon soap, plaid shirts and ink-stained hands. He was a writer, my Nathan. What I didn't know was that he decided to write his own ending me.
Without me.

It was always the box/ When he was five, he dug up a small wooden box in the playground and never let it go. It makes me laugh because he thought it was some sort of magical treasure chest. When he became a boy of nine, who could string words together like beads, he still didn't discard his beloved box for the crisp, new journal I gave him for his birthday. I never felt compelled to take a quick peek and see what, exactly, he kept there. I always tried to give him his own space, his own privacy.
Until now, of course.

The first thing I see is a pen. It's one of those awful, scratchy ballpoints from the corner store, with zero ink inside it. There's a tiny paper taped to it, which reads "March 1994". I twirl the pen with my trembling fingers and remember. Scouring each and every wondrous memory gathering dust inside my head, I remember.
He'd written his first prize-winning poem with this. It was titled "Shades of Moonlight" and I recall now that I had played Clair de Lune on the piano from him, the day he wrote it.

Next, there is an actual poem, but one that I haven't read. This is odd, astonishing, because I know I've read every single thing that Nathan has ever written. My eyes crawl across the shy words, in his familiar lilting hand. He's written about unrequited love, a girl with hair the colour of hopeful dawns and dancing to 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. An old Polaroid snap smiles at me from under the remnants of golden confetti that he saved from his high school prom. He's alone in the picture, in his favourite blue plaid shirt, a copy of "Great Expectations" tucked under his arm. It pains me to realize that it's one of the only photographs Nathan is smiling in.

There are things that I expect to see, like a battered copy of his favourite book "The Great Gatsby", those shiny badges from writing camp, a set of fancy, gleaming Mont Blanc pens Lewis gave him for his sixteenth...and then there are things I don't expect.
A crushed, lonely cigarette jammed in the corner, an Iron & Wine CD, another poem filled with deep, dark thoughts that make my heart shudder.
It's slowly dawning that never really Nathan at all did I?

I absently trace a childish mosaic he made in kindergarten while my eyes collapse over the various fragments of my son's life that I never knew.

I see it now. He's slipped it underneath his notebook of famous last words. (His favourite was "Tomorrow, I shall no longer be here" by Nostradamus.) Of course.
Of course Nathan would leave it this way. I see it now. What I had somehow been expecting to see all along.

His suicide note.

He has written,
"It's time to go."