"Do it, you know it's the only way. All this pain and suffering you have been through, it will all end after this. It's the only way. Do it, do it!"It started last year, around August, in the midst of all the work he was doing then. It begun with the faintest whisper at the side of his head, a distant voice somewhere in the recesses of his mind; a voice that became increasingly vocal and frequent as the months pass by. It was after his breakup with his long time girlfriend. It told him that nobody will ever like him.
He blamed it on the lack of time because of his busy schedule. He was studying in school for most parts of the day and worked most nights. Weekends went to work as well, it was the prime time to squeeze in as many students as possible. It was where the money was, tuition. He ate his meals alone most of the time; the meal timings he had were too erratic to be able to arrange any meet ups with his friends. The voice slowly begun to materialise more frequently.
"Why do you even bother? There's no meaning to all this."
At first, he found the voice to be all too defeatist, and simply pushed it away to the back of his mind, as if it wasn't there. Slowly he found that the voice made sense. What was the point of working so hard? What was the point of studying? Getting a useless piece of paper, just to be thrown into another mindless cycle of work day after day? What was the point of life? You do so much, but what ultimately comes out of it? You leave the world alone, just like how you came in. You can spend your life the happiest man, the richest man, but you'll leave just the same way as the poor beggar who lies starving by the roadside. Alone. With nothing. Without meaning. What was the point of living? It all begun to make sense, what he should do.
He took a deep breath, and the stale night air rushed through his lungs. The night was beautiful. Darkness covered the housing estate like a cape, blanketing itself over the buildings whose occupants were fast asleep in the wee hours of the morning, save a few lone souls, marked by lighted windows, dotting the nightscape; blocks of life in the silent night. The stillness of the night reflected his thoughts and sentiments, a lone leaf floating in the middle of a lake. Moving, yet still. Invisible, yet present.
"Don't you see? No one would care if you were gone. Nobody would care! You're nothing to them!"
The voice broke the tranquility of the night. It was right, no one would miss him. His students treated him as a paid worker, useless once there was no need for him. His friends treated him like an object, a marvellous thing, a subject of conversation of a machine who worked without stopping. An object. His parents were always asleep when he was home, and still fast asleep when he left the house in the morning. No one would care if he was gone.
He took a step forward and looked down. It was a long fall. But death would be quick. No one could survive the impact. Falling. Maybe he would finally know what it felt to be free. Falling through space, unbounded and free.
His body was found by a passer-by two days later in a bush.
-
Disclaimer: Not advocating suicide over here, funny how inspiration comes from all sorts of places. Was taking abit of shut-eye on the train but was awoken by horrendous singing of a guy sitting beside me. Hence the word, voices.
