There is something I don't like to talk about when it comes to mental illness, but it is something that needs to be addressed nonetheless. Many who have suffered at the hands of mental illnesses have also faced the thought of suicide, the thought of ending the struggle. I cannot say I am an exemption, nor can I say I have not hurt and reached for the sweet hands of relief. I have been close to death before at the hands of some accidental circumstance, and I know what it is like to stare at death's door. I have seen with my own eyes what it is like to see your own demise reflected in the eyes of people you love. I have been the person on the other side of suicide, too; the person left behind, and there is always someone left behind. This is about suicide.

Through these eyes, on the other side, I can see that death is not a release but an evangelical monster preaching to the sad ones, the ones whose pain will not cease.

The skeletons in my closet aren't bones and piles of calcium deposits; they are living, breathing entities who seek to rain down pain and destroy me every minute I continue to breathe.

There are flesh-ridden, spell-bound hellhounds I try to keep locked up inside a distant place in my mind, in some forgotten compound, but they escape every time, every damn time attacking me the second their feet hit the ground.

This is no life worth living for any grandiose span of eternity. This is prison on the land I was born for, and I am its prisoner from birth to the time I start giving in to dogs and skeletons that are striving for the very essence of myself, my life, and what little of me is left in this body of pain and sin.

There is one thing, one feat, I have been able to do. One task I can actually complete, despite my escaping skeletons and each hellhound I'm bound to.

I can spite the ones who seek my defeat, past the scars forming around my hollow heart before the cage surrounding it is complete.

Through these eyes on the other side that have seen the face of death one too many times, I know he is not an old friend and not one I seek with full peace of mind.