Heavier than the polyester blanket crawling up my legs and across my hips, it’s darkness that weighs down my skin tonight—my back pressed firmly against an undisturbed comforter, my eyes fixed on something much further away than my ceiling. A breeze peeks through dusty blinds, chilling the pool that’s collected on my pillow, tracing the lines up my neck, my jaw, my cheeks. I feel the moonlight creep onto my left arm, I hear the air conditioner rumble outside, but I’m not in my room.

I've been on the low
I've been taking my time
I feel like I'm out of my mind
It feel like my life ain't mine
Who can relate?

It’s 2:00 AM and I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to Logic croon through my headphones, somehow twisting and turning too-familiar thoughts into something beautiful. I slowly, then quickly, fall back into the bed that watched me grow. Despite how deep I managed to bury myself under layers and layers of other selves, I’m suddenly fourteen all over again—picking up the pieces of my shattered body in the empty stairwell of a parking garage, learning for the first time that my body is anything but mine.

I don't wanna be alive
I don't wanna be alive
I just wanna die today
I just wanna die

I live as a zombie, drugs propping open sunken eyes every morning and forcing them closed again each night. Glances and whispers turn to shouts and unsolicited grabs as I drag my feet down bustling hallways and obscure side-streets in any attempt to avoid faces that know...but don’t know. Wandering eyes, outstretched arms, dirty fingertips, constantly remind me where my body’s horizon lies. Constantly remind me where the internal screams fall silent. It feels like I’m drowning, but I can see everybody around me. And they’re all just going about their lives. And nobody notices that I’m drowning.

My body continues to drag over concrete surfaces, into the car and then out, from one hell into the next. Locked in my room, the routine yellings and poundings sail effortless under my door, but I’m thankful. I’m thankful because five-year-old me didn’t have a door in between, five-year-old me had to watch fists connect.

I've been praying for somebody to save me, no one's heroic
And my life don't even matter
I know it, I know it, I know it
I'm hurting deep down but can't show it

November was nice. It’s harder now, but I think it was nice once. Now the whole month turns into one day, one night. It was silent. Each pill washed down with another, burning the back of my throat, warming my stomach, blurring my vision, until I become the nothing that I feel.

My eyes blink...blink...blink. I didn’t think the light at the end of the tunnel would look so much like the fluorescent bulbs that blind entire hospitals.

Oh.

The dams break and my eyes overflow. My lips loosen to let out an enraged howl but release only the broken whimper of a kicked dog. You can’t even kill yourself correctly, permanently burns into every inch of my skin.

It's the very first breath
When you head's been drowning underwater
[...]
It's holding on, through the roads long
And seeing light in the darkest things
And when you stare at your reflection
Finally knowing who it is
I know that you'll thank God you did

Each time, it’s the voice of a woman that propels my body six years into the future, placing me gently amongst the polyester and moonlight. I turn my head to the left. The pool has mostly evaporated, leaving only a damp reminder against my cheek. Like the pool, the pain is distant now but still there, evident in the mascara stains tattooed on my pillow case. And every morning, like this morning, I watch the sun peek around a rocky horizon that no longer suppresses screams.

Logic’s new song, 1-800-273-8255, named after the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, drags me back to a place I’m often too scared to go. I’m not going to say, “I wish it came out when I was blah, blah, blah…” because realistically, I don’t know if it would have changed anything. But this song means more to me than I can ever begin to explain to anybody. I might live a different life now, with different people, in a different city, but every person yearns to be understood. That’s what Logic gave me, and others—understanding.

There’s a whole part of my life nobody knows anything about anymore. Sometimes it gets heavy, and sometimes it hurts. But here’s what I have to say, what I say to anybody who’s ever been where I’ve been, what I have to remind myself of:

It always hurts. It’s always going to hurt. No matter what, that pain doesn’t leave you. Somewhere along the line, the pain changes, yes, but never leaves. At first, it hurts because it’s happening. When a bone breaks, or a heart, it hurts to an almost indescribable degree. When you look back, it still hurts, but less and less as time goes on. That kind of pain is no longer “it’s happening” pain, it’s remembering pain. And remembering, means it’s in the past.