Elaine had always been a prisoner of her own mind. The void and the darkness were always there. They came and went at the most unexpected time, but there was never any way to get rid of them completely. Sometimes they were palpable, crackling on her skin, and sometimes they laid deep and buried, throbbing from within. Elaine had always been ill, insane, mad, not quite right in her head – you name it. Ever since she was a girl, a little child, abandoned by her own indifferent parents and raised by her strict and way too religious grandpa and grandma.  She never liked talking about what was going on in her head with other people. She was the type of person to let it pool and congeal within her being until it would become too late to save herself from her own madness. Almost seven years ago she was diagnosed with psychotic depression, delirium and self-injure disorder, but those had been with her even before her time in mental hospital, before psychiatrists and shit loads of medicine. Sometimes it seemed to her that her madness had been with her even before her birth, but she couldn’t know it for sure, could she? She could only fight it, day and night, trying her best to seem normal and lead a normal life. And then it occurred to her one day that it would be better for her to kill herself. The thought came on her suddenly, as she was walking alone down an oddly deserted street. The sun was brushing treetops lightly, a cool breeze was playing with her dark hair, and Elaine thought:
“I should just kill myself.”
All things considered, that seemed very much like a good idea. Elaine would have liked to say that she had never considered such a thing before. She would have liked to say that she lived her life as a strong person, and that that thought had only entered her head like a wild thing that appeared completely out of random. The opinions of the people around her on suicide all seemed to be rather mixed – some said it was a perfectly reasonable and responsible thing to do if things got bad enough, and others said that it was thoughtless and selfish. But  the opinions of others and what her family would think didn’t seem to matter quite as much to Elaine as it used to. And she'd had these thoughts before. The first time had happened before she was taken to the mental hospital. The last time actually hadn’t been so long ago. She had been in the shower, looking at her razor, turning the pink handle over in her hand, eyeing the blade pensively, and thinking about her life. That day in her shower, Elaine had held her razor close to the skin of her wrist, hands trembling. She had tentatively pressed the cool metal down on her wet, warm wrist, and raked it downwards. A bead of blood bloomed on her skin, as dazzling bright as a garnet, and Elaine had stared at it, suddenly light-headed and giddy, a strange, bubbly feeling gushing in her chest. But the moment had passed, and Elaine lost her nerve. The razor clattered to the shower floor. She was quite confident that she won't lose her nerve again. But she wondered how she would do it. That was when she came to realize that she needed a little assistance if she wanted to succeed. So she hurried on her way home, sat down by the kitchen table and started composing her note almost furiously. She couldn’t even write it properly, she felt so tired. She felt darkness stealing her sight, so she had to hurry. That sort of thing tended to happen once in a while when Elaine happened to be more nervous than usually. It seemed like her body was so desperate to shut itself down, to switch off like some kind of electronic device, just to save her from her own worrying. She got used to it, just like she got used to voices in her head, constant panic attacks and sleepless nights. So she went on writing the note for her husband which started with “Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again.”  Maybe if she didn’t feel so utterly miserable at the moment, she wouldn’t have been able to write the following words, asking her dear William to help her with killing herself. She expected him to understand. She knew that she had been spoiling his life with her illness for so long, that it would be only right of her to set him free by means of her death. And Elaine wasn’t asking him to kill her, she only wanted him to drive her to the nearest seashore, which couldn’t be all that far from their sunny Philadelphia, and to stay with her until the end. She had always loved the sea and wanted to take a last look at it before she would take her own life. She needed his presence to be brave enough to get it over with at last. Was it so much to ask? She felt sure that it wasn’t. She felt exhausted when she finished her rather short note, which she then put on the fridge like an ordinary grocery store list. At that Elaine was done. She didn’t even stay to wait for her husband to come back home and headed to their empty bedroom instantly. But she didn’t go to bed right away, she waited until the pills she’d taken had done enough to ease the aching in her head. She’d forgotten to buy a new bottle of Advil, but Tylenol was almost as good. It was so tempting to take more.