How You Will Be Alone
By Mea Cohen
One bottle of Tylenol, one bottle of your mother’s antidepressants, and one glass of orange juice will not kill you because your father will arrive home early from the office.
You will encounter at least four types of people in pro-suicide chat rooms: fellow depressed adolescents; depressed adults pretending to be teenaged; teens who join the chat to taunt their peers; and, finally, the men who open private chats with young girls.
You will spend every night of your sixteenth summer on Chatroullete. One night, you’ll stop clicking next and watch a man masturbate, watch his hand tug itself back and forth, as though on a track. The motion will become monotonous and you’ll let your eyes slack and your vision cross. His hand will become a distant waving cartoon animal. Every day that summer, you will ride your bike down a hill. Some days, you’ll see how close you can get to the bottom before breaking. The hill will run directly into a thoroughfare.
A friend will take you to visit with her family in Amsterdam. They will show you around the city, everywhere by bike, you on an old spare with chipping yellow paint. You will want to enjoy this. You will want to want to be there, with your friend and her beautiful, smiling Dutch family, and the squeak of breaks at every historic attraction. There will have been some wire cut somewhere inside you, some mechanical error, you’re certain. A short-circuit, perhaps. You’ll stay back at the house, while they go out cycling through the city.
There will be parking lots at night, in front of sleeping corporate buildings, or near tired warehouses, or beside railroad tracks. You will sit in your car and weep. There won’t be any other cars around, not a person in sight, only the trees lining the lots, and darkness painted between their trunks. So you will cry a hideous loud sound until your lungs are exhausted. There will be other parking lots at night, and you will sit in cars with boys, and you will become dangerous, and those boys will become men, and you will stop scribbling their names in a journal.
When you are a child, you will be hurt terribly by a bigger person. You will forget about it. Sometime in college, you’ll remember it, just a bit. You will wonder how it is that no one else knows. You will wonder where it happened, how no one saw, no one heard. You will become distracted by the architecture of rooms. How unsafe doors can be. The way walls can change your life’s trajectory.
THE END
Author Bio: Born and raised in the Hudson Valley, Mea Cohen is a writer now based in New York City. She holds an MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University, where she was a contributing editor for The Southampton Review. Her work has appeared in Ladygunn, Milk XYZ, Passengers Journal, and On The Run.