I work at a suicide hotline. 1-800-248-8336 will take you to Teen Lifeline, and if you call on a Wednesday or a Saturday, there's a good chance I'll be the one to answer.

"Hi, this is [me] from Teen Lifeline. What's your name?"

One of the first things they teach you during basic training is that callers won't always tell you what they're feeling straight from the get-go. You have to poke and prod and force the dark places open. The first time I had to ask The Question--"Are you feeling suicidal right now?"--my left hand got tangled in the phone cord and my right was white-knuckling the receiver, trying to pull the truth through the telephone wires.

"Yes."

"Can you tell me where you are right now?"

Safety first. I have to know you're going to live through this phone call.

"Do you have a plan?"

If it's a no, I can take a breath. It goes from a crisis to a conversation, just like that. If it's a yes, I tip back in my chair and bite my fingernails while we talk (not that you'd ever know).

"Before we move on, could you make me a promise that you won't hurt or kill yourself, and if you're thinking about hurting or killing yourself, you'll call back and talk to me first?"

And then I make you repeat it, the whole thing. In fact, I'll probably make you repeat it two or three more times before you hang up. There's nothing else I can do to keep you safe. You could live in Illinois and I could live in Alaska and by the time I book a plane ticket you could be in a river like a postmodern Ophelia. For some reason, it is harder to break a promise made to a stranger than it is to kill yourself. Your promise to me means that you'll call back, and we'll talk again, and you'll promise again, until eventually you realize that I am never going to let you off the hook and you may as well get help.

I know what it's like to not want to get out of bed, to stare at your ceiling and wish you never had to move, to keep a little black notebook full of drafts of notes you could only dream of leaving behind one day. I also know what it's like to stand in the pulpit of a church you don't go to, eulogizing to a group of people you've never met, all of whom wondering what they could've done differently to make things turn out better. I am telling you that you are not alone, that there's a world of help out there--on the internet, on hotlines, in your friends and family (even if it doesn't seem like it), on public forums, in support groups, in churches, in therapists' offices, in the gym, wherever you'd like. Your reasons for living and for dying are your own, and I won't try to put new ones in your head--just please, promise me, that if you're thinking about hurting or killing yourself, you'll reach out for help first.

Challenge

Teenage angst. Admit it, we've all been there haha. Share your most angst filled poem from those dramatic teenage years, or, you could write a new one from a teenagers point of view.

desmondwrite

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Fiction—The ink on his arms

[Wrote this my senior year in high school. I was kind of an emotional mess.]

As he showered from another day,

the ink on his arms was washed away.

It'd been left by friends with ecstatic pens

who in excitement had been carried away.

One wouldn’t rub off no matter how much he scrubbed,

drawn by a girl whom he had once loved.