This serene blue, expansive sky is a contradictory thing to this sunken, withered heart, long drowned in this water that never stop rising.

Every day, at my break time, I would sneak up to the school roof, stand near the railing, sometimes leaning forward on it with my elbows and look down at the impassive grey brick ground, and stare. Occasionally, I would lean forward just a bit more, and I could feel gravity pulling me, like how Marcus would pull me to the ice cream shop when he saw one. It's such a small force pulling but it's the small things that count in the long run.

Just like how my thoughts of death may one day convince my hands to let go of these railings.

There's something fascinating about death. It's a black hole that never stops taking people away and we are their escapees, desperate to live another day and experience life to the fullest. Death is like the dark, existing after the light of our life extinguished, where they eventually will take us into its dark abyss, unbeknownst to the living of where we are.

Few of us will be willing to go next to that black hole and fantasize what will it be like to be in there. There are even fewer who will think that after death existed a certain peace that life can't give anymore.

I step backwards from the railing, and avoid looking at the ground. The temptation always gets the strongest at this moment.

I imagine that there's always a moment before landing into death's hands, that free-falling moment where my hair will be combed by the air, and I will feel the wind dance across the bare skin of my hands and subsequently my body. And at the end of it, it will be the sound of my body breaking, bones crushed and flesh smashed, and it will be a symphony of a death parade. It will be painful, I can imagine but it will also be liberating. A minute of pain before death is a good deal for an escape of perpetual pain, darkness—

And drowning.

Every day, every minute, I wish for peace. Just a moment that I don't have to feel like I'm useless. Just a moment that I don't have to feel like there's no way out from feeling this shame, guilt and loneliness. I took the peace in my younger self's heart for granted and never learn to treasure it. And now that I see everybody's natural smiles and happiness, and I'm standing at the other side of the glass, as if I'm watching a television that showed a fantasy dream. One that is meant to be imagined but not experienced.

I grip onto the railing, trying to hold back from whatever my heart wants me to do just for a moment. It's these moments that are crucial and important and if I can hold on a little longer, I will not feel it as strongly later on. I just have to hold on.

My tears well up but they refuse to fall. Guilt dominates the other feelings as it taunts me about what will happen if my parents know about these thoughts, these feelings of mine. They will be ashamed of me. Only weak people would feel like dying.

The sky is still a serene blue. It's still too high up.

And I turn away from that railing, just like the previous times. I always wondered afterwards about how did I convince myself to leave that place again and again. Maybe I wanted to give the light another chance; maybe I was grasping at the last straws, knowing the finality of my decision.

But I always walk out of those moments with the same heart and a weaker will.

One day, this will is not going to enough to hold me back from that gravity.

It's always the pain that I feel, the muted pain that sticks itself into my heart like a knife, staying there as it allows me to bleed to death—except it's not a real death that promises peace. And that's worse than dying.

These thoughts that swim in my head sometimes turn into a whirlpool, taking away almost everything I have left that can last me another day. It's like being deprived of something so fundamental to who I am and without them, I'm nothing but a puppet—no, a speck of dust that would be swept up soon. A dust? No wonder I'm useless.

But more than that, sometimes these thoughts would evolve and turn into the ocean that would come alive from my head, drowning me in the moving waves, and no matter how many times I tried to swim above these waves, trying to see that blue sky, trying to breathe in the air above, I couldn't fight against the waves that kept coming over my head and this exhaustion had weight my body down, rendering it nothing but a piece of meat. This body is nothing but a support for a life that I deem too painful to live.

I watch the sunlight filtering through the window and the dust illuminated by that luminous light. I pull the drawer open and play with a bottle, throwing it from my right hand to the left. If I am too pussy to take these pills then I can still go up on a roof and do it. It will not be difficult. Dying is easy.

I look at the wall in front of me. Marcus' smile was bright and his blue eyes twinkled with joy. Beside him was me, with his arm around my shoulder, as if he was proud of me. We took that picture in a cross country competition and I remembered Marcus telling me that if I had finished the race, he would bring me to the carnival and play whatever games I wanted to. It was one of those moments I can still remember and cherish, seeing colors in it for a moment, unlike everything else that have turn black and white—only that this world is turning darker and blacker as the day goes by.

I place the bottle on the table beside my bed as I put all my strength—inside me, I'm fighting against the wave that submerge me—and stand up. My hand grazes the wooden surface of the table and I catch my brother playing baseball outside with his friends, howling with laughter as my mother is watching with a gentle smile, calling out when my brother made a home run.

I love them. I really do.

I take the bottle and place it back in the drawer. I bite my lip and look through the window. Why do I feel so far from them? Why can't I understand the people I once knew like the back of my hand? It's like they are up in the sky, too far to reach as my hand reaches for them before the waves come back again. I no longer know the sky as my home but I know the ocean is the hell that lives in my mind, building and latching itself to every thought that I have.

It's my fault. I should have spent more time with them. I want a mask, a full body mask that does everything that shows happiness to them, so that I don't have to do it and risk having those moments that I rage, those moments that I show this raging ocean in me. I can't risk their derision of me. That's the only thing I don't want to allow to surface in my face, in my expressions.

I breath in. I'll not die today.

But I don't know when I'll slip and let go of everything that threatens to destroy what I have now and take away what I don't want—but still hold on tightly.