Trigger Warning: Mentions of suicidal ideation, desire of death

Imagine waking up every morning to an existential crisis where you're always the loser. No matter how hard you try to fight the little voice in the back of your head, you feel in your bones that you have no reason to live. At this point, your life seems like a cruel joke between you and the universe that never ends.

The face wash in your cabinet lies untouched for yet another day. Logically, you know that using it is the only way to prevent more acne, but you can't muster up the energy to care. That seems to be a common trend in your life lately.

It's almost scary how you've memorized scripts for most of your social encounters.

"I'm fine, thank you, and you?"

"School was OK."

"I'm OK."

The voice in your head always gets a kick out of the last statement. It says you're a coward for lying to everyone -- even yourself -- all the time, but you know that's not the truth. Whenever you try to speak, the words don't come out.

They get caught in your throat like an avalanche that can't touch the ground. Tumultuous and overflowing to the brim, where would you even begin? It doesn't even make sense to you why you feel this way, so how could anyone else possibly understand?

Other students mock you for being so quiet. Their insults don't even come close to what you say to yourself at night. Is there any way out of this mess?

How does one regain the will to live when they've lost so much of themselves? The question hangs in the air in the quieter moments of the day. You do your best to drown it out by distracting yourself with whatever low-effort, instantly gratifying activity you can find.

Of course, the voice in your head has words for that too. It chides about your laziness and how you're wasting away at such a young age. Maybe that isn't such a bad thing, you figure. It's one step closer to leaving this world.

Sometimes bits of sunshine pierce through your darkness. Instinctively, you run away from them and hide. This feeling is becoming an addiction and the scariest thing is that you're okay with it. Better to have demons hold you than nobody at all.

At this point, you're sure you won't live past 15. There's just no way someone with such little will to live could survive so long. Hopefully.

Because every agonizing day leaves you that much more discontent. That much more desperate to vanish for good. And yet, there's a step that's missing.

You have no way to leave this planet. You simply don't know how. But there's one other thing:

A tiny fragment of you, that even the little voice can't see, believes in a brighter future. It's a needle in a haystack, but you know exactly where it is. On the better days, you pick it up and stroke it from time to time. Thinking. Dreaming.

What if you had a purpose? What if you wanted to live? What if one day you crawled out of this hole and set it ablaze?

It sounds like something you'd read in a book, but you're a hopeless romantic so a tiny part of you believes in it anyway. Over the years, that tiny part of you grows larger than the clay pot you planted it in. Soon it inhabits a planter, then a jar, then a room, then your soul.

Many years later, the dark hole becomes an artifact of your past, but it's no skeleton in the closet. The reason you do what you do now is because of what happened to you, and that means shouting the truth for those who lost their voice.

P.S. I didn't mean to get all meta on you lovelies, but it kind of just happened.

If you or someone you know is experiencing a crisis, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.