The Summer I Died

PROLOGUE

To avoid the nightmares of that summer, I take caffeine and diet pills, any type of speed to keep me up for as long as possible. As a result, I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours a night in a long time. My eyes have sunken near to the hollows of my skull and I shake with malnourishment because the pills suppress my appetite. My face is bruised and my thighs are dotted with purple welts and half-moon scars from where I have punched and pinched myself to keep myself awake. I am eroding. But this is a far better alternative than the dreams of that summer. That summer of lost innocence, pain, and bloodshed beyond anything you can imagine.

The pills don’t, however, prevent my daily questioning and ranting, nor do they stop me from cursing at God. They don’t keep me from shaking my fist at the sky and crying with disgust, irreverence, gratitude, confusion, or any other of the myriad emotions I experience each day. Still though, I am unsure whether God played a part in it at all, or whether or not God even exists.

There are times, late at night, when the pills have worn off and I’ve slipped into a semiconscious state, that I wake myself yelling at the top of my lungs. I find myself back in that summer, only this time I am telling myself to leave the dice at home, or to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. I wake up and continue to yell, until I am hoarse, until the bloody images dissipate. Then I yell some more. I don’t know why I keep yelling once I realize I am at home in the present. Perhaps to feel my own rage and fear, to know I still have emotions.

Perhaps.

People have asked me-therapists, friends, even a biographer-how I felt that summer when I got home from college, before the bloodshed began. I tell them I was happy. They seem to think they can return me to that point. But, trust me, that person-the me from then-is dead.

For all intents and purposes, the moment I picked up the gun the first weekend I was back was the moment that started it all. Tooth was excited to have me home from school and I was eager to hang out with him. He had convinced me to go shooting with him. .