The Summer That Changed Everything

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.