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MARKUS

January 2016

As for that day, I had just one dream: death.

Seriously.

I didn’t want to live anymore. I was never going to get out of the depression’s deadly grip. There was no hope for me anymore; I couldn’t resist the call of darkness. I could almost feel its sharp nails on my wrist. It pulled me like a sea current or gravity. It was like I stumbled and couldn’t stop falling. This would never end… not unless I did something about it.

I walked to the edge. It was covered with a thin layer of ice. The frost appeared early that fall, at the beginning of October. Petals of summer roses wilted like my unrequited love. And then I stood there on the roof of my high school. It was eleven p.m., and I could have chosen a place from which you could see the whole of Berlin. But honestly, it didn’t even matter. I wanted to die, and any tall building with a parking lot made of concrete was fine.

Every time I inhaled the January air, my lungs swelled with pain. I had run out of ideas on how to deal with it. Was there any point in trying to get better anyway? Maybe I was the one responsible for this state of mind. What if depression was nothing else but me, my true identity? These medications I’d been taking for so long, did they even work? I felt like nothing had changed since I got the prescription. I felt more and more detached from reality with each coming day.

Susanna... Susanna! I loved you so much. Sometimes it seemed to me that I would never liberate myself of that suffocating emotion, which was the only thing left in my heart. The emotion lived by itself, quite independent of this terrifying, indescribable emptiness in my brain.

Everything was so, so wrong, and small things made it all even harder to bear. Why did I feel like this?! Why, why? What did I do to deserve all this?

I couldn’t find an answer.

“Markus!”

I turned around, feeling the wind in my jacket and hair, which should’ve been cut at least a month ago, and I saw Karsten. He, of all the people in the world.

“What… what the fuck,” I whispered, my eyes slightly widening.

“You’re right!” he shouted. I have never heard him scream; his low voice changed to a strangely shrill one. “This is fucked up! All of this! What are you doing here, huh? ARE YOU SICK?!”

Karsten was my classmate and partner in the bio lab. He slowly scribbled down the results of our experiments while I struggled to measure the cress shoots that didn’t want to stand straight. After a few minutes, I lost my patience and uprooted one of the stems.

“How can you treat it like this? Zero tenderness!” He shook his head with disappointment.

Karsten had a special weakness for plants, and that was why we were working on that stupid project, even though we could have chosen anything else. Studying the effects of Coca-Cola on chicken bones did not sound bad. But first, we had no place to store the experiment (and we were sure it would stink), and second, in that scenario, I would be completely useless to him.

I shouldn’t have chosen biology, but in the end, I did. Working with Karsten was okay, even though I considered him a total weirdo. He signed up for the International Baccalaureate Diploma, the IB Program, although his only ambition was to become a master chef. I couldn’t understand his way of thinking. Why didn’t he go to a cooking school? He always seemed to choose the more difficult path. Another example was the fact he didn’t even have Facebook. Wait, if he didn’t have Facebook…

“How did you know I was here?” I asked.

“Your blog.” He shrugged as if it was obvious.

“My blog?” I echoed, so shocked that I almost staggered. Luckily, I stood far away from the edge and didn’t risk falling unwittingly. It would be a horrible irony to have fallen by accident at the very moment when I planned to take total control over my life. “Don’t tell me you’re still reading it!”

I might have told him about my blog during our first year. I wrote mostly about football, but later, I started mentioning Susanna, and it all became somewhat personal. In the last few months, I’d mostly vented there about how much I hated my life and wanted to die. I couldn’t believe that Karsten remembered the address and kept reading my posts throughout all these years! He had never said anything.

How could he sit next to me in class all this time and behave as if he knew nothing? He never said a word about my long sleeves, even though he must have known I was cutting. On the other hand, why would he intervene? We weren’t close friends.

Besides, if he had approached me about that topic, what would I have actually said to him? Yes, I’m cutting. No, I don’t intend to stop. It’s an urge that I can’t control, an addiction, a way to self-medicate that helps me keep myself together.

I looked at him.

He had just run out of his house. He was wearing winter sweatpants and a large, dark green sweatshirt. The cloud of his unruly hair moved in the wind. On sunny days it had the color of the setting sun, yet now it looked like a lonely tumbleweed. If it wasn’t for the seriousness of the situation, I would probably joke about it.

Instead, I approached the edge.

“No!” he cried.

“Stay there!” I ordered him. “Stay, or else…”

“I beg you, don’t do this!” I’d never seen or heard him like that, and I must admit that it somewhat scared me. He looked like he was going to cry; his heart was breaking right in front of me. “Think about your dad and about your grandma… You can’t do this to them!”

“Karsten,” I took a deep breath, “you have no idea what I’m going through.”

“You’re right! I have no idea, but… but I just can’t stand here and watch you take your life!” He seemed genuinely distraught. “I know you are depressed, but there are other solutions.”

“My life is full of despair. Despair that nobody can acknowledge or comprehend. I’m exhausted of fighting battles in my head all alone.”

“But things could get better!”

“YEAH, THEY COULD, BUT THEY AREN’T!” I yelled at him. I was running out of patience. I was sure I would kill myself. If not that night, then another one. It was too late for me to be saved. I had to die. “Do you think I would be here if things were getting better?! I’m so fucking tired of waiting for one day to be over and seeing another bring nothing, just nothing!”

“Markus…” He tilted his head, tears glowing in his eyes. “You don’t want to die. You just want the pain to stop.”

“No kidding!” I responded sarcastically.

“How can you know that it’s better on the other side?” He took a shy step forward. “I think it’s better to live and try to improve your situation with the resources that are available rather than ditch everything and disappear into the unknown.”

“The real hell is here on Earth, Karsten.” I thought he would protest, but instead, he sighed in agreement.

“I know. Still… I don’t want you to go.”

I knew that nothing could make me reconsider, yet I had to admit I was slowly starting to feel sorry for him. He didn’t deserve to watch his classmate commit suicide right in front of his eyes.

“Call me an egoist, but I don’t want you to disappear forever,” he said. “If you go now, you will make this place even worse than it already is. I believe there are still many things that you can change to make your life better.” He took another shy step towards me.

I knew that if I let him get any closer, he would be able to catch me. I wanted to tell him to step away, but somehow, I couldn’t force myself to. The survival instinct in my head needed him to stay.

“I failed at so many things,” I said, my heart heavy like lead. “I can’t do sports anymore. And Susanna… She will never love me. Then, there are only four months left before our finals… I just can’t take that stress anymore.”

“You need a break,” he decided.

I wriggled my hands.

“I can’t take a break. We are in the IB Program, remember? There are so many things to do for next week, including those stupid Creativity-Action-Service evaluations. I’ll never write them the way Elise wants.”

“Markus… Forget CAS. Your mental health is more important. I can’t believe that you’d prefer to kill yourself rather than graduate with a not-so-perfect score. And as for football, you know full well it’s not your fault! Besides, I’m sure your knee problem is only a temporary thing. It will eventually go away, and you will be able to return to the field. Everything is going to be all right!” He desperately tried to cheer me up. I wished I could believe his words, but the vicious voice in my head kept saying, lies-lies-lies-lies-lies.

“I must go,” I said simply and turned away from him.

I was ready.

If it had to happen in that way, with Karsten behind my back, I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t asked him to come here and get into a debate over my miserable fate.

“NO!” He grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward him. I was stronger than him, but he caught me by surprise and actually managed to drag me one or two steps away from the edge. “Don’t do this! I’m begging you!”

“Then give me a reason why I should keep on living!”

“There are thousands of them, Markus!”

“One!” I demanded. “Just one. One that will convince me.”

He took a deep breath, then looked me straight in the eyes.

“I love you.”

An electric jolt of surprise rushed through my chest. It lasted only a moment. I managed to calm down instantly. Of course, he told me he loved me. I should have expected it. I would probably tell him the exact same thing if the situation were reversed. Hell, I would tell that to anyone who was standing on the edge! Even my worst enemy.

“I love you, and I want you to know that no matter what, you deserve to live,” he pleaded with me. “You are unique, and you will never appear in the same form again if you end things now. This moment, it will eventually pass. Think of all the good things that can still happen. Think about your family. About… me.” He looked sideways as if he couldn’t bear the constant eye contact. “I have been so worried about you for a long time. I wanted to talk to you so much, but I didn’t even know where to start. I ran here with my heart in my throat. Don’t do this to me. Don’t do this to yourself!” A tear fell down his cheek. “You won’t survive this jump. As soon as you find yourself in the air, you will regret it. But then it will be too late. There is a solution to everything except death. Please, please let me call your dad and grandma.” He took the phone out of his pocket.

“Don’t you dare!” I hissed. “My dad is sleeping—he’s tired and has to rest!”

“Yeah, he’ll surely be sleeping well once his one and only son takes his life.” Karsten wiped his eyes. “Let me call the suicide hotline then.”

“If you call it, they’ll lock me in the psychiatric hospital, and that won’t help me. On the contrary!”