He sharpened his knife twice that night. He sat on his bed with his legs crossed at the ankles, yelling above the music playing in the background of what should have been a normal moment. His eyes were scarlet ringed and the salt from his tears had collected on his cheeks. It wasn’t like him to cry. The bright white lines on his wrists were illuminated by the black-light he had hung above his bed years before. He hadn’t turned it on in ages and it was odd that it was on then. Sometimes a person’s last moments don’t have to make sense.

There was a gun tucked away in the top drawer of his night-stand with one bullet it in it. He had pulled the trigger five times weeks before in a solo game of Russian roulette that he hasn’t had the luxury of losing. He had been afraid then, afraid to leave life behind just in case it got better. Under his pillow there was a half-empty bottle of pills. The other half of the bottle were somewhere in the sewers near his house. He had changed his mind after taking them and vomited them up in the toilet. In his lap sat a knife. He had taken that knife and bled his wrists more times that he could count, and tonight would be the final time.

He had it all planned out that time, and there was no room for backing out. He would drink the pills the he had been saving, he would saw his wrists in half with the knife he had been sharpening, and then he would swallow the bullet he had been too afraid to fire. His family was a mess, his relationship had ended, and the only thing he had left in the world was a girl he would never meet. There wasn’t enough left for him to stay for. Talking him out of it wasn’t an option that time. There was never going to be a next time.

He died once in August, then three times more in November. Each time he did a girl thousands of miles away would cry for him. Her tears would fall down only to evaporate and fall again later. She cried a thousand times and then a thousand times over. She sat up late at night and waited for 2am to roll around, waiting for him to call her. She cried again when he didn’t.

She should have given up. She knew after the first time that there was no more saving him. There’s no saving someone who’s already dead. The abandonment hurt the most. She knew that he didn’t love her enough to stay for her, yet she still kept hoping, and she still kept searching for a way that he would. It was all the same to her in the end, the sting of death. Eventually she felt it less and less. She wondered always if he did to.

He never really left her; he still lived in her memories, still lived in her phone. She could scroll back in time and find the things that he told her. Like the day he told her she was beautiful. He meant it, and she meant it when she told him that she loved him. He didn’t love her like she loved him. He could never love her like she loved him.

Suicide was an ugly word for awhile. Slit wrists and hard rock made her head spin. In the end she fought passed it, got over it. She stopped crying on the outside and started bleeding within. It wasn’t her heart that was bleeding, it was her wrists and her brain was melting. She wasn’t allowed a mourning time. No one cared how much it hurt. She let it go and walked away, shaking the pain off her shoulders. She would miss him always, but four times dead is too many, and she never wanted to watch it again.