Overcoming suicide with marketing tactics.

I ran, I jumped, and I landed.

I’m 13 years old, and I’m spending most of my weeks daydreaming and living in worlds that weren’t quite mine.

I haven’t made it to drinking, loving, and feeling. But I am smoking, and I am curious to know what life would mean if I had someone else's eyes.

My favourite colour was green and I would sit down, gaze into my 1024x768 resolution screen and sift through the photos of my friends. What shoes were they wearing? Who do they take photos of? Photos of their parents?

Back then I had always thought myself to be an artist of some sorts. I learned Photoshop CS2 and I wanted to attend an art-school, I wanted to be friends with different people. And I wanted to have the world so condensed I could carry it and see everything with my bare eyes.

But the world would always turn black and white in the middle of the day. And I would get mad because I couldn’t hold onto the magic.

I’m 14 years old, I’ve started drinking, made several online girlfriends, started experimenting with feelings and now I’m on a roll. I’m still not living my own life, I’m catfishing in online chatrooms but I’m feeling… something.

I’m now an “artist”, I make Photoshop edits in exchange for pixel cosmetics. I’m barely in ninth-grade but I’m starting to understand people. It’s vanity, it’s partnership, it’s like self-obsession and maybe that self-obsession was something to obsess about. Something had to be learned there.

I’m 19 years old, everything has calluses.

I know my favourite colour is green but closer to forest green now and I’m smoking weed, drinking beer, and cutting over old cuts. I forgot how to drink in moderation, love at a reasonable pace, and feel the earth beneath my feet. Now when I look through my screen, cars are flying by me at 100km/h and the sky is so massive. Oh, so massive. My hands were always so sweaty — maybe I wasn’t cut out to hold the world. I’m still watching everyone else but I’m not handling this well. Maybe I’m not living my own life yet.

I’m 19 years old, and I jump in front of a speeding car.

I’m daydreaming again. The cardiac monitor reading is in green. How funny. Why does everything have to be this way?

I’m 27 and I see blue.

I’m not an artist anymore, but, I think abstractly sometimes. I tend to connect more with the inanimate and less often explained. But I can connect to people now. I can tell them about themselves. I can see all the details. Their shoes, their photos, their platforms, their gripes, and their successes.

I ground myself in others' shoes.

I open my screen now and I make changes. Impactful changes. I can create something that people can connect to. I can throw an idea out and watch someone catch it with their bare hands. I can use words to encapsulate emotions because feeling is more important. My world is an apple and I’ve learned how to do things in stride. Now, I go for long walks because each step puts me a little more forward than the last and that’s the pace I’ve grown to like, and oh, is the sky massive.

I’m 29 and green is still my favourite colour.