My voices sometimes told me that a knife, a rope, a gun is better for you than artificial happiness taken with a small glass of water.

What they forgot to mention was the pain; the pain I don’t feel, the pain my family feels and that everyone feels when they lose a child- a friend, a being that was once so much a part of their lives and is suddenly gone.

Those voices are a vicious volley of emotional arrows, each weighted with poison that drips into my veins and runs smoothly, silently to my mind.

Every word is painted and stained, ingrained into me forming the image of a black meadow littered with broken dreams and shattered promises.

It’s a bombshell that never ceases to explode;

It’s an ebony heart whose dead beat will not stop;

it’s woe in its worst form, death inside of life-

it’s depression, an emotional storm.

They say three million teens are clinically depressed in the US, but to most that’s just another meaningless statistic.

A meaningless statistic? It’s meaningful and cryptic that so many people must witness a horrific inner business that runs on forcing them to be a misfit!

Many nights I stare at a black wall and wonder if I will wither and die in my sleep, I wonder if the reaper will finally reap.

No pill will swallow that void, and that void will still swallow my mind. I could sit there for hours to years and think about how I can only hear "the S word".

It’s a word that strikes fear into our family’s hearts and some manage to think,

to truly believe in their own ignorance that it is something beyond our youth’s capability.

It’s not above our youth’s capability, it’s a door that leads to broken stability.

It is a growing cancer that infects our destined machination and like a cancer can only be cured with dedication.

Our dedication.

Their dedication.

Dedication, dedication, dedication.

It’s the word that is drilled into our minds and yet is ignored, shunned because of the very disease it tries to cure.

We know what we have to do, yet that sneering voice, that sinister choice comes back to say: “you can’t do it,” “you’re nothing,” “you’re better off dead!”

and then, like a scratched and twisted record it repeats itself night and day for time unsaid

and I am defeated;

the song of self-loathing is one that must not be repeated.

Despite it all you must be resolute as stone.

Undeterred, unfettered, steady upon your throne.

Remind yourself that you are not alone, that we are not alone, that

none of us are alone.

I too, then, must remind myself that I am not alone

and more often than not,

I find that solace in mind is my only home.