Buying my bullets one bottle at a time.
If I had a gun, I would use it on myself.
Something quick so I only have to feel the pain for an instant.
Then everything goes black.
I hate the idea of a knife or razor.
I don’t want to waste time watching the life ooze out of me.
Even pills don’t work for me because I fear waking up in the middle dying.
All I want is to stop feeling anything.
So I do it the hard way, the safe way, one beer bottle at a time, torturing myself in strip clubs where dancers make fund of me even as they take my tips, then ignore me when the tips run out.
Out of booze money, too, I stagger through the door to the street and wander the dark places of the world where ugly things always pop out at me with the flash of headlights.
I think: if a car is moving fast enough or if a truck is big enough, I might throw myself in front of it.
But I don’t..
It takes courage to be a coward.
If I don’t have guts enough to go home and face the wife and kids each night, I won’t have courage enough to kill myself either.
So I wander and think and grow sober again while I wait for it to become late enough for the family to be asleep when I get there.
I never meant to get married or have kids.
That stuff just happened.
I knew I was no brain at school and that I would never end up as a Donald Trump or Albert Einstein.
But I always hoped I would end up somebody, maybe get a sports scholarship somewhere or even a job as a college coach.
Now I work loading and unloading boxes on a conveyor belt, and sometimes I’m so stiff at the end of my shift I can barely climb into may care.
Even then, as I break my back to keep the conveyor line packed, I hoped I might find a better life someday.
But even that gets beaten out of you after a while, by the labor and by asshole bosses.
I guess maybe I’ve been told I’m worth shit for so long I started believing it myself.
Sure, I took it out on my wife, then my kids, but eventually, I had only myself – drinking and whoring, until I needed drink more than the whores.
I usually get home sober, but late enough for everybody to be asleep.
I don’t even look at my wife in the morning and go to work feeling even more like shit than before.
I’d kill myself if I could end it quick. But I’m scared. So I just keep on buying my bullets one bottle at a time, dying on the inside every day a little a time.