The Suicide Diary Read Online Free PDF Page A

my feet.  “I have to be home soon.” He leaned in and kissed me on the lips and when he pulled away I remembered I had been holding my breath and inhaled quickly.
    He never actually said the words, but from that moment, he referred to me as his girlfriend. The weeks continued much as they had before, except after skating and our group lunch, we would wander around just the two of us.
    Nine weeks after he first said ‘Hi’ to me, I found myself walking up the driveway to Conor’s home for the first time and when he unlocked the front door and I felt the stillness in the house, I realised we were alone. He fetched some juice from the kitchen while I sat in his room. I don't really remember what it looked like - maybe we forget these things over time. I guess the colour of the walls or furnishings are unimportant, but I did notice the wall had none of the posters you would expect to find on the wall of a teenage boy. And yet I could see the markings where they had been - a few pieces of blue-tack and paper corners were left as if they had been torn down.
    He seemed reluctant to sit down so I made myself as comfortable as I could - I think it must have been one of those giant bean bags because it rustled and moved so much I was afraid to even fidget. He finally sat opposite me and I sipped juice while he reached over and pushed a CD into the player and music blasted into the room. He quickly turned the dial down and we laughed a little.
    "Is your Dad out?" I asked.
    "He goes to the cemetery every Saturday afternoon like clockwork. It's why I started going ice skating, I don't want to talk to a headstone. I want to remember my Mother as the person she was, not in a cemetery buried in the cold ground." he replied.
    I didn't respond, there was no way to answer that without repeating what he had probably heard a hundred times over from well-meaning people. So I blinked the pity from my eyes and looked at him, hoping he would take the silence as my willingness to listen when he was ready.
    He looked into the corner of the room, but it felt like he'd suddenly left the room and when he spoke it didn't really feel like he was talking to me. “It was cancer. I was thirteen when I first started to notice things weren't right. She was different, stopped giving me hassle about my homework, always making a huge fuss when we said goodbye, and acting like the three of us were having this great, fun, adventure together going away on weekends and holidays. It went on like that until I was fifteen, but whenever I mentioned that she was being strange, she would tell me I was being silly and that wasn’t a Mother allowed to tell her son she loved him.” He paused and I could see his jaw clenching.
    “Just after Christmas last year they sat me down and told me everything - that my Mother wasn't going to be around, she had a disease that was going to take her from us. The doctors had told her it’d come back and there was nothing they could do. They gave her three months to live but when she passed the six month mark, we thought maybe she was strong enough to fight it. And then one day she…just collapsed and she never came home from the hospital.” He was still staring into the corner of the room; he was choking out the words and I could only watch as I saw tears run down his right cheek. It was almost as if I wasn’t there and he was just speaking out in anger at someone – I wasn’t even sure if he was religious or not, but he had good reason to feel angry and want someone to blame.
    Conor knew the brief facts of my father's departure so I wondered if he felt I should understand just a little more than his friends could and maybe that was the reason he was drawn to me.  It wasn't the same thing, but in a way I had gone through the loss of a parent just in a much less final way.
    Sometimes I don't think I’m wired the right way. I sat there speechless, watching his whole body shudder as he choked out tears. I knew it had to be so