I arrived at school and took a deep breath before I walked through the door. My classmates stood at their usual spot in the hallway and even my best friend was already there. I hugged her but ended up standing in the corner. She was talking with our classmates and laughing. I watched them all as I did every morning, but I didn't understand them. They were so happy. I wished I could be like them. But I just felt empty, kind of dead. I didn't remember when that feeling had started. When life had started being so complicated. I remembered that as a child I once had been really happy. It hadn't mattered at all what others thought. All that had mattered was that I was happy. I had just turned sixteen and cursed the day when everything had changed. The day when it did matter what kind of clothes I wore and what my hair looked like. The day when I started putting make up on. I cursed the day when the opinion of others became important. I cursed the day I actually grew up. Every morning. I had often tried to convince myself that someday everything would be better and in the end everything would make sense like it always did in the movies. But life was not a movie. No matter how much somebody wanted to believe that. There were enough people who remained unhappy their whole lives, and if there was something I knew, it was that I never wanted to live like those people.

My best friend’s boyfriend joined the group and kissed her. I looked at the floor. There was this guy. This one guy I loved to look at, whose voice I loved to hear and whose laugh made me laugh every time. This one guy whose eyes could light up in the dark when he was teasing me and whose hugs made me hold my breath, although I wanted to breathe in his smell and never breathe it out again. This guy didn’t know what he did to me. He didn’t know that I waited for a message or a call from him every second or that every ringing phone made me yearn to see his name on the display. He’d never know how many nights I lay awake while all my thoughts revolved around him. My best friend knew I liked this boy, but even though she had a boyfriend herself, I don't think she understood how serious it was for me when I talked about him. I believed to her I just had some stupid crush. I wished she could see how much more than that he meant to me, even if it wouldn’t change a thing.

We went to our classroom. I walked next to my friend.
“Is something wrong?” She asked, worried.
“No, I’m fine,” I lied.
She turned back to her boyfriend, caught up in him once more. I wished she could see I had lied. But she didn’t. I loved my best friend. She was one of the most important people in my life, and I wished I could explain that to her somehow. I knew she liked me, but it never felt as if I was as important to her as she was to me. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she did know all that and maybe I meant as much to her as she told me, but there was nothing I could do against feeling that wasn't true. Just as I never felt as if I meant anything to that special guy. Not even as a friend.

Sometimes I thought about how it would be if suddenly I wasn’t there anymore. If I just didn't exist anymore, what would they do? Who would actually miss me, and who wouldn’t care at all? I often thought about dying. I knew for sure I could never kill myself. I couldn’t even pluck my own eyebrows because I was afraid to hurt myself, but there were these days when I just didn’t want to exist anymore. It seemed that these days were happening more frequently. Days like today, yesterday, and like tomorrow would be. Nobody knew about it. Nobody saw it, because no matter how often they asked me how I felt, I’d always answer with “Fine”, no matter how much I wanted them to know. Where would I start? How would I explain it to them?

The day passed me by like it did yesterday and like it would do tomorrow. I copied from the board without knowing what I actually wrote down. I sat with my friend and her boyfriend at lunch without really being with them. And nobody knew. Why did I think it was that much easier to be dead than alive? Probably because I didn’t really live anymore. To me, living had to mean more than just breathing.

I walked home with my headphones on. Alone. Like always. I didn’t live far from school. It was November and the weather didn’t help me to feel any better. The sky was gray, it was windy, raining and cold. The road seemed longer than yesterday and all the days before. I walked over the bridge like I did every day, stopped and looked down. Now and then a car passed by. Below me was water, but it seemed endlessly far away. I wondered how far it was to the water, and whether the bridge was high enough for the fall to kill me. I thought about how I had stood and looked down here yesterday and I knew I would stop at the same place tomorrow to look down. It felt so much easier to jump than to walk the rest of the way home. My thoughts ran on. I thought about my friend standing happily next to her boyfriend. I thought about my classmates sitting in class, talking and laughing. I paused and closed my eyes. I thought about that one guy whose voice I loved to hear and whose laugh made me laugh every time, whose eyes could light up in the dark when he was teasing me and whose hugs made me hold my breath.


She put her pen down on the paper on her desk and looked out the window to the gray November sky for a moment. Then she got up and left her room. There was just one difference between the girl in her text and herself – she will jump.