I see body
bags every day, this one, no different. That same plain blue becomes so monotonous,
so easy to forget the contents; negating countless lives. The unzipping always takes me back to childhood days spent camping; that early
morning surfacing from the tent, tearing the fly screen open to eagerly set out
for a new day of adventure and exploration. Easy, care free days.
Inside this body bag was a dead girl.
It should have been no different, but seeing her tore a rusty nail through my heart. She was one of mine – one of the ‘freaks’.
Her tattooed body displayed bands I loved, logos I knew, artists I admired. She could have been my friend.
She could have been me.
Seeing her made the pain fresh, brought me to that moment, those final seconds of desperation as she stretched her neck into that noose. It was the most common way these days: hanging. So easy, almost everyone was doing it.
Through a latex barrier, I caressed her cold flesh, rippled by years of self-harm. A pain I was intimately familiar with. She was younger than me, by five or six years, but she was here. She was one of the ones who hadn’t made it. I’d tasted that pain almost every day and felt how easy the way out could be. Not the act, the temptation. How it grasped at the darkest part of your mind and suffocated you with it. No kind deed or happy face or friendly grin made its way through that jumbled web of grey: hatred so intensely self-destructive.
Her life, reduced to a report and a photo in a file. Her organs sampled in a pot with a label. Her, just a body on a trolley – a statistic on suicide.
