Sitting on the bed. Legs crossed. Trance-like state. Staring at the wallet. Spreading them out. Organizing them. Staring at them. Staring at them. Staring at them. Ears ringing. Moving without knowing it. Hands shaking. Picking one up. Staring. Can’t look. Closing my eyes. Taking it. Sipping water. Swallowing. Opening my eyes. Repeat. One by one. Can’t think about it. Keep going. One by one. Keep going. None left. None left. Finishing final notes. Sending her my goodbye. Finally telling her I love her. Already hazy. Nothing is real. My eyes close. Nothing is real. I’m sorry. Goodbye

No one thought I’d survive it. I did. A crazy amount of opiates mixed with barbiturates; I planned and planned. Waking up in a daze, unable to talk, unable to walk, everything shaking. Blood pressure too low to take a sample, drifting in and out of consciousness. On breathing machines, ready to be intubated at any minute, mother and father watching their child die; I remember none of it.

What I do remember, I wish I could forget. The years and years and years of overwhelming anxiety. The isolation, the apathy, the learned numbness. Experimenting with restricting and purging, self harm. Avoiding schoolwork for years, starting to fail all my classes after being told I was ‘way too advanced to ever get a B’. Staring at my homework, staring at my homework, staring at my homework, going numb and wanting to scream because I couldn’t do it. Maybe I knew the material, maybe I didn’t, I couldn’t do it and I didn’t know why, my parents didn’t know why, no one knew why, why, why all of this was happening to me.

Deciding that year was the last, planning for months. The rush I got from buying the pills. The only good type of anxiety I’d ever felt.

I cracked. Pictured my parents finding my cold body in the bed, mother crying and yelling, father throwing himself on top of me, trying to turn back time; I was okay with it. I pictured her seeing my final words, reading my note, whispering ‘I love you too’ to an audience who couldn’t hear it; I was okay with it. I cracked and everything that mattered in my life, all the reasons I was keeping myself alive for so long, were meaningless. Nothing was real. I was a teenage nihilist, deciding the meaning of life in my free time instead of going out with the friends I didn’t have. I decided there was none.

I don’t see a point in living. Life is meaningless, everything is made up, and people are just self-righteous, floating molecules that think the universe is able to acknowledge their existence. Life is meaningless. But, do I need meaning to do something? Do I disappear if I recognize the futility of life? No. Everything is trivial, pointless, needless, life is meaningless and I want to succeed.

My brother breaking down in front of my mom, our mom, his mom, crying about all the things he never said. The four and six year olds, the three year old twins across the street wondering what happened to their babysitter. Friends that were no longer friends thinking about how far things drifted and what went wrong. No longer okay with it. The depression, the anxiety, the OCD, the unstable mood, the self-hate; they all still exist. I won’t pretend they don’t exist for the sake of getting into college, won’t pretend I’m perfectly okay, won’t spew the cliche essay I think you want to hear about how I’ve had a rough life but life is a journey and I’m on a road to a better future and everything’s okay. It's not. Life sucks. Life sucks, and I want to try. Life sucks, and I want it to continue. Life sucks, and that’s okay.

Why am I so afraid of terrorism? Because it’s a powerful enough force to keep Donald “Future Hitler” Trump in the race to be our next Dear Leader.

Why am I so afraid of terrorism? Because fear mongering is powerful enough to shut down mosques and put France under its first Nationwide State of Emergency (which means legal unprovoked house searches, by the way) since 1961.

Why am I so afraid of terrorism? Because black people are being dehumanized and attacked and killed and in America, The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and you’re too focused on creating a database to track all the Scary Muslims.

2,753 people were killed on 9/11. Very sad. Tragic, even. Lots and lots of White People were killed by Scary Muslims that day. And thus, the War on Terror began. Around 1.3 million people (Scary Muslims) were killed in retaliation. Support Our Troops.

And now, after 130 people were killed in Paris, a 3 month long panic has been issued so that the authorities can keep the peace and torture every Scary Muslim in sight.

Here, we have a serious Presidential candidate who is proposing making every muslim in America, The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, register in a database so that he can better manage the country. I see no parallels to the Holocaust. After all, Trump is just trying to define what it means to be an American, which is nothing like anything Hitler said as he was creating the perfect Aryan race.

And what’s happening here while Trump is Making America Great Again and brainwashing our citizens to believe Scary Muslims are the real threat? We’re systematically murdering different people of color.

We all rose up and fought for justice when Michael Brown was killed. A lot of us stood up when Tamir Rice was murdered. Some even stayed when Eric Garner’s death made the news. Then, we heard nothing.

Did something change? Did we stop all the police from killing people? Are people of all races now coming together to dance in the streets and sing? Or did the passion for black lives dwindle when people found something else to care about (Scary Muslims)?

Black people now make up almost 1 million (out of 2.3 million) of the incarcerated population, even though they only make up 14% of the population. Also, one in six black men are in prison, and that rate is expected to rise way up.

There was an actual, modern day, real life lynching in Mississippi. Police found 26 year-old Frederick Jermaine Carter hanging from a noose off an oak tree in a predominately white neighborhood, which was written off as suicide.

The Ku Klux Klan is a real thing that still exists today. A group with the sole purpose of promoting white supremacy and “purifying America” (sound familiar, Donald “Future Hitler” Trump?) literally still exists and thrives today without question or backlash, other than the acknowledgement that it’s not a great organization.

But, yeah. Muslims are the real terrorists.