Memior Letter, rough draft
Another Creative writing assignment
Dear Alice,
I wrote my first suicide note when I was six. I’m not sure why, I don’t remember what was going through my mind or why I wanted to die or how I was going to do it, I just know I wrote the note and my mother put my in counseling. I don’t remember much of the counseling but I know it was very boring. After that I was put in every accelerated school program they could find.
School was boring. The programs were boring. And the children were both boring and stressful. I hated school even though I was a model student. Probably because I was a model student. There was nothing there that I *yearned* to learn, nothing I *wanted* to achieve. Besides that we kept moving from state to state, school district to school district, so there was little point in making friends.
I first got serious about suicide in junior high. I was as serious as someone researching possible methods could be I suppose. I mostly remember thinking no one would care if I disappeared. I never got the guts to actually take myself out of the picture though. Call it selfishness, call it premonition, call it what you like. I couldn’t do it.
High school was different. I’d lost the one person I loved like an older sibling and I think I went a little nuts for a long time. I drove my creative writing teacher up the wall, my parents through the roof, and my self right into counseling. I cut myself, I got suspended, I found out the only people who’d miss me were my parents. I got a prescription for Zoloft and told that I had issues relating to people. Considering I sat in the front row of my science fiction class for an hour and carved up my arm in front of god and everyone and the teacher said nothing, then sat in the front office of the school and repeated the process without anyone ever asking me if I so much as had a question… yes, I had problems relating to people.
I got better after that, I suppose. I went through school, got my diploma, made friends and lost them, got jobs and lost those to. I stopped thinking about suicide. Well, okay, maybe not really. I thought about death a lot. I still do. I write about it, I imagine it, I watch shows that deal with murder and suicide and missing persons, autopsies and hangings, poison and fire. I write about people do the worst things they can to each other so I haven’t stopped thinking about it at all. I still go to bed at night wondering if I’m a monster sometimes. But I don’t think about killing myself.
In college I wrote a short story, more like a prologue, that no one liked except my science fiction professor. He wanted to edit it and get it published. He thought it had potential. It was the first time a piece of my morbidity had been accepted as literature. It showed me that I could write the darkness in my mind and there would sill be people out there who would read it. Like the people who watch SAW or Rob Zombie movies.
Suicide has always been a friend of mine. I’ve known people who tried it, some who succeeded, and some who denounce it as cowardice. I watched an old woman will herself to death in a hospice a bare month after her husband was laid to rest. I watched my mother cry over my scars and my therapist struggle with the fact I was fourteen and in MENSA, but I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I’m human, what do you want me to say?
So, dear reader, make of this what you will, I’ve lived with death and never died, I’ve become friends and fascinated with the subject of suffering in the abstract and morbid but am no different on the outside than the reflection in your bathroom mirror. I’m not a survivor, I’m not a villain, I’m not particularly special in any way. I simply started falling into madness and decided to dive. Welcome Alice. I'm sure we'll be good friends.
-Cat
And the final Draft:
Dear Alice,
There are rules in Wonderland. I’m sure you’ve figured out a few. The first is that nothing is ever what it seems. No, not ever. Your parents raise you to be a good girl with all the normal family values, eat your vegetables and love your country, and then you learn as you hit that vulnerable age of self discovery, that they don’t love each other at all and you’re the only thing keep their marriage together.
You think you have your life figured out because you know what you want to do, but no one ever tells you the price tag do they? No, it’s all the hype, ‘you can be whatever you want’. I remember believing that Alice, with wide eyes and curling blond hair, sitting prim and proper, drinking up the wisdom of my elders like fine wine. Most of it was lies.
Nothing is ever what it seems Alice. You met the white Queen and the March Hare, and I think you’ve started to get a handle on rule number two of Wonderland. Such a fast learner you are little girl. Yes, language is a deceiver. Flies with butter yellow wings are just the tip of the proverbial ice burg.
Flame burns cold, and the cold can burn. I think my favorite language foul up is ‘I’m sorry.’ Because people only ever feel sorry after they get caught, don’t they? You might feel guilty about the little girl whose dreams you’ve ruined by telling her that she’ll never run another marathon or get into the Air Force, will never feel the rush a thousand horses under her ass as she pulls five g for a split second in a double succors roll trying to get a lock on an enemy fighter in the name of the Lord and mom’s cheesecake.
Yes, dreams can hurt. They can hurt worse than those rose thorns through your palms, bleeding ever so prettily on your little white apron. Red is quite a color isn’t it? Don’t worry too much about it, it all washes out. In the end.
Where was I? Oh yes, rule number three, now, this is very important and I hope you understand it well, Wonderland is madness. Oh, yes, we’re all quite mad here, very special in our own ways. Paranoid, schizophrenic, addicted to things that are vile and some of us have no names for our madness. But we’re all mad. Even you. After all, have you ever tried to define ‘normal’ or ‘sane’? Tricky business. Never quite works.
I’ve talked to therapists, sat in overstuffed leather seats and stared into their vacant eyes, spun out my life story and listened to their judgments, swallowed their little white pills and felt a haze as of a veil pulled tightly shut across my mind. Do you know what they said Alice? I can’ quite remember, it was so long ago, but the message was clear all the same. ‘You’re mad. Take this collar and leash and we’ll guide you safely home.’ It made me feel rabid.
There’s one last rule Alice, before you get to be crowned Queen at the end of the chessboard. It’s the hardest rule I ever picked apart from the festering soil of decay and disillusionment that lies beyond the edges of wonder. Wonderland bears a price. You can walk out, be free of us forever and live the life you think is right because someone told you so. But you leave a part of yourself here in the shadows. A bit of your heart, childhood, innocence, will always keep us company. To take it with you, out there, you must see that world with our eyes. The eyes of the cynical and jaded and quietly bewildered.
You can see it can’t you? The days of sewing and prayer, feeling the ache in your chest as your husband tells you his day and you prepare dinner. The gray shades the world is comprised of, as though twightlight and dusk are the only hours, the scent of lavenders and rosemary in a house somehow always a little too cold.
A world without wonder, without madness, without deception or fear or passion. Hatred and anger and fear are passion in different pelts Alice, but you knew that before you ever came here. If you hadn’t, the White Rabbit would never have been seen.
That’s the rule Alice, you can have life without meaning, or meaning without life, but only together are either worth grasping. Have you got it? I haven’t. Not quite yet. I’m walking the roads though, following you at times, at times ahead. I’ve lived my days till now trying to pass off passion as a passing fantasy, a childish play on fickle emotion, and perhaps I was right all along. But now my eyes are open, as they were so very long ago when I wrote my first letter to mother and father, saying good by. For the first time I can feel the edges of Wonderland for myself. I’ll see you at the end of the chess board.
I can’t wait to see you.
-Sister
Dear Alice,
I wrote my first suicide note when I was six. I’m not sure why, I don’t remember what was going through my mind or why I wanted to die or how I was going to do it, I just know I wrote the note and my mother put my in counseling. I don’t remember much of the counseling but I know it was very boring. After that I was put in every accelerated school program they could find.
School was boring. The programs were boring. And the children were both boring and stressful. I hated school even though I was a model student. Probably because I was a model student. There was nothing there that I *yearned* to learn, nothing I *wanted* to achieve. Besides that we kept moving from state to state, school district to school district, so there was little point in making friends.
I first got serious about suicide in junior high. I was as serious as someone researching possible methods could be I suppose. I mostly remember thinking no one would care if I disappeared. I never got the guts to actually take myself out of the picture though. Call it selfishness, call it premonition, call it what you like. I couldn’t do it.
High school was different. I’d lost the one person I loved like an older sibling and I think I went a little nuts for a long time. I drove my creative writing teacher up the wall, my parents through the roof, and my self right into counseling. I cut myself, I got suspended, I found out the only people who’d miss me were my parents. I got a prescription for Zoloft and told that I had issues relating to people. Considering I sat in the front row of my science fiction class for an hour and carved up my arm in front of god and everyone and the teacher said nothing, then sat in the front office of the school and repeated the process without anyone ever asking me if I so much as had a question… yes, I had problems relating to people.
I got better after that, I suppose. I went through school, got my diploma, made friends and lost them, got jobs and lost those to. I stopped thinking about suicide. Well, okay, maybe not really. I thought about death a lot. I still do. I write about it, I imagine it, I watch shows that deal with murder and suicide and missing persons, autopsies and hangings, poison and fire. I write about people do the worst things they can to each other so I haven’t stopped thinking about it at all. I still go to bed at night wondering if I’m a monster sometimes. But I don’t think about killing myself.
In college I wrote a short story, more like a prologue, that no one liked except my science fiction professor. He wanted to edit it and get it published. He thought it had potential. It was the first time a piece of my morbidity had been accepted as literature. It showed me that I could write the darkness in my mind and there would sill be people out there who would read it. Like the people who watch SAW or Rob Zombie movies.
Suicide has always been a friend of mine. I’ve known people who tried it, some who succeeded, and some who denounce it as cowardice. I watched an old woman will herself to death in a hospice a bare month after her husband was laid to rest. I watched my mother cry over my scars and my therapist struggle with the fact I was fourteen and in MENSA, but I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I’m human, what do you want me to say?
So, dear reader, make of this what you will, I’ve lived with death and never died, I’ve become friends and fascinated with the subject of suffering in the abstract and morbid but am no different on the outside than the reflection in your bathroom mirror. I’m not a survivor, I’m not a villain, I’m not particularly special in any way. I simply started falling into madness and decided to dive. Welcome Alice. I'm sure we'll be good friends.
-Cat
And the final Draft:
Dear Alice,
There are rules in Wonderland. I’m sure you’ve figured out a few. The first is that nothing is ever what it seems. No, not ever. Your parents raise you to be a good girl with all the normal family values, eat your vegetables and love your country, and then you learn as you hit that vulnerable age of self discovery, that they don’t love each other at all and you’re the only thing keep their marriage together.
You think you have your life figured out because you know what you want to do, but no one ever tells you the price tag do they? No, it’s all the hype, ‘you can be whatever you want’. I remember believing that Alice, with wide eyes and curling blond hair, sitting prim and proper, drinking up the wisdom of my elders like fine wine. Most of it was lies.
Nothing is ever what it seems Alice. You met the white Queen and the March Hare, and I think you’ve started to get a handle on rule number two of Wonderland. Such a fast learner you are little girl. Yes, language is a deceiver. Flies with butter yellow wings are just the tip of the proverbial ice burg.
Flame burns cold, and the cold can burn. I think my favorite language foul up is ‘I’m sorry.’ Because people only ever feel sorry after they get caught, don’t they? You might feel guilty about the little girl whose dreams you’ve ruined by telling her that she’ll never run another marathon or get into the Air Force, will never feel the rush a thousand horses under her ass as she pulls five g for a split second in a double succors roll trying to get a lock on an enemy fighter in the name of the Lord and mom’s cheesecake.
Yes, dreams can hurt. They can hurt worse than those rose thorns through your palms, bleeding ever so prettily on your little white apron. Red is quite a color isn’t it? Don’t worry too much about it, it all washes out. In the end.
Where was I? Oh yes, rule number three, now, this is very important and I hope you understand it well, Wonderland is madness. Oh, yes, we’re all quite mad here, very special in our own ways. Paranoid, schizophrenic, addicted to things that are vile and some of us have no names for our madness. But we’re all mad. Even you. After all, have you ever tried to define ‘normal’ or ‘sane’? Tricky business. Never quite works.
I’ve talked to therapists, sat in overstuffed leather seats and stared into their vacant eyes, spun out my life story and listened to their judgments, swallowed their little white pills and felt a haze as of a veil pulled tightly shut across my mind. Do you know what they said Alice? I can’ quite remember, it was so long ago, but the message was clear all the same. ‘You’re mad. Take this collar and leash and we’ll guide you safely home.’ It made me feel rabid.
There’s one last rule Alice, before you get to be crowned Queen at the end of the chessboard. It’s the hardest rule I ever picked apart from the festering soil of decay and disillusionment that lies beyond the edges of wonder. Wonderland bears a price. You can walk out, be free of us forever and live the life you think is right because someone told you so. But you leave a part of yourself here in the shadows. A bit of your heart, childhood, innocence, will always keep us company. To take it with you, out there, you must see that world with our eyes. The eyes of the cynical and jaded and quietly bewildered.
You can see it can’t you? The days of sewing and prayer, feeling the ache in your chest as your husband tells you his day and you prepare dinner. The gray shades the world is comprised of, as though twightlight and dusk are the only hours, the scent of lavenders and rosemary in a house somehow always a little too cold.
A world without wonder, without madness, without deception or fear or passion. Hatred and anger and fear are passion in different pelts Alice, but you knew that before you ever came here. If you hadn’t, the White Rabbit would never have been seen.
That’s the rule Alice, you can have life without meaning, or meaning without life, but only together are either worth grasping. Have you got it? I haven’t. Not quite yet. I’m walking the roads though, following you at times, at times ahead. I’ve lived my days till now trying to pass off passion as a passing fantasy, a childish play on fickle emotion, and perhaps I was right all along. But now my eyes are open, as they were so very long ago when I wrote my first letter to mother and father, saying good by. For the first time I can feel the edges of Wonderland for myself. I’ll see you at the end of the chess board.
I can’t wait to see you.
-Sister