DIE IN PEACE

"Find him!"

With his hand pressed against the gaping wound in his side, Giovanni jogged as quickly as he could through the darkened streets. The adrenaline coursing through his veins was the only thing keeping him moving at this point, as the searing pain radiating from the gash threatened to bring him to his knees.

Behind him, he could hear the shouts and pounding footsteps of his pursuers, their voices growing steadily closer. He dared not look back, knowing that any moment of hesitation could cost him dearly. All he could focus on was putting as much distance between them and himself as possible.

His lungs burned with each laboured breath, the acrid taste of fear coating his tongue. Still, he pushed on, rounding a corner and praying that he turned it quick enough to find some avenue of escape.

When through his blurred gaze, he caught the chain link fence at the end of the alley, he cursed his fortune under his breath. "Jesus fucking Christ. Make it harder, why don't you?"

His eyes desperately darted left and right in search of another way out.

Just as the sound of his pursuers reached a fever pitch, he spotted the fire escape ladder hanging just within reach.

Glancing down at the red staining his hand and his shirt, he could not help but wonder if he would be able to make it up there. He released an exhausted breath and summoning the last of his strength, he leapt up, his fingertips grasping the cold metal rungs. With a strained groan, he hauled himself upwards, the jagged edges of the fence scraping against his legs as he climbed.

Fortunately, the men chasing him reached the outskirts of the alleyway the second he managed to make it to the top of the balcony clumsily.

He could hear their frustrated shouts and carefully, he stared over at them over his shoulder, watching the bald one desperately searching for a sign of where he might have gone. When he whipped his head around to glance into the alley, he crouched low and willed his ragged breathing to slow as he waited, heart pounding, for the danger to pass.

When the blur which was previously obscuring his vision returned, he pinched his eyes tightly shut to try and get rid of it again.

While stumbling against the damp wall on the rooftop, his hand pressed tightly against the stabbing pain in his abdomen. The cold night air did little to soothe the burning sensation radiating from the gash. His breathing was beginning to thin out. He tiredly glanced down to see the warm, red liquid seeping in between his fingers.

Who knew this was how he was going to make his final exit?

When he was younger, he always imagined how he would die.

Well, rather how he could off himself.

Too much?

He never learnt how to exercise proper social etiquette around other people. He rarely left the house enough to develop what others would call a normal social life. His parents did a very good job of shielding him from the world, to protect the population from the peculiar child they had spawned into existence.

These dark thoughts started when he was quite young, he could not separate them from his everyday thinking. Brief, fleeting thoughts of accidentally slipping on a patch of ice or succumbing to a rare disease. Then the scenarios became increasingly vivid and elaborate. He would imagine dramatic car accidents ending in fiery explosions or even something as peaceful as drifting off to sleep and never waking up again.

Lights. Shadows.

The first time he discussed these peculiar thoughts with a friend at school, he was met with bewilderment, and when this friend went home and told his parents about him, it got his parents involved.

They were immediately concerned about him.

That was when he realised that his peculiar fascination with the prospect of his own mortality was not normal. Most children apparently dreamed of fantastical adventures with their dolls and playing house around their peers, practising for their future lives.

As he grew older, the people around him started to notice that something was a little off about him and he was labelled as some kind of disturbed outcast. Even though he should have, he oddly did not mind all their distancing. The feeling was merely reciprocated. He too adopted a tendency to avoid people. He merely saw them as a hindrance to his ultimate goal of… well, killing himself.

Lights. Shadows.

He had no control over it. The thoughts merely subconsciously entered his mind. Especially when the noises around him got drowned out by the haze that a couple of beers and a few crushed pills entrapped him within.

Tonight, he had already lost count of the number of plonks he had chugged down.

After some time passed, he made his clumsy descent back onto the ground, containing a groan of pain when the sudden movement pierced an additional stab through his gut. Carefully, he lifted his damp shirt which stuck to him to check the damage. Warm blood was still gushing out and when he put pressure on it again, holding in a hiss, it was immediately evident how bad it was.

At the back of his mind, he had a feeling that his past was going to catch up with him eventually, but he did not think it would have been because of his carelessness. Bad things always seemed to happen whenever he chose to drink alcohol. Now he was paying the price for his foolishness again.

Getting stabbed sure was a bitch…

He slowly slid down the wall.

"Where did he go?" he heard a straggler's voice yelling into the night.

Fearfully, he pressed his back into the rough brick wall to hide behind the dumpster, willing himself to disappear into the darkness.

"Fucking find him, you morons," another man bellowed, his familiar voice dripping with malice.

He could hear the thud of heavy boots as his henchmen scurried about in the almost silent night, scouring the shadows for any sign of me. Beads of nervous sweat trickled down his forehead as he strained to control his shaky breathing, praying they would not find him.

The search party's footsteps grew louder, their gruff voices echoing off the surrounding buildings as they barked orders to one another.

His heart raced within his chest and the sound of their approaching footsteps mixed with the pounding of his own pulse. He closed his eyes tightly, desperately hoping for a miracle, any chance to slip away unnoticed. The constant surge and ebb of adrenaline left him feeling increasingly drained, his body weary from the relentless onslaught.

"You cannot hide forever, Gino," the man who was in charge of this lot yelled loud enough for him to hear. "You think I found you coincidentally tonight? The same way I found you this time, I will find you again."

I believe him…

Eventually, their footsteps grew fainter and he began to relax.

As the life slowly drained from his body, his thoughts unwittingly drifted to the first time he felt like this.

The first time he tried to end his life, he was twelve years old.

Before that, he was merely toying with the prospect of death, gripping broken glass to replace the pain he was constantly in. This was when the depression the psychologist diagnosed him with was at its peak. Going to high school caused something greater to envelop him in its embrace and from its embrace, a coldness would seize him tightly. A coldness that would sink through his pores and freeze everything within him.

He would walk down the hallways, face stoically hard and gaze deathly blank, being avoided and avoiding.

He chickened out, by the way.

He could not kill himself. The idea was too painful to execute.

He did not like pain. That was something his bully confirmed for him while growing up.

Lights. Shadows.

Afterwards, he sat on the floor in the middle of his room with his legs crossed, until the hard ground caused his arse to grow numb to feeling. His mother found him. She and his father came home from work and when they noticed the thundering silence of the house, they must have felt that something was wrong. She called out to him worriedly, but he did not respond.

Looking back, he really should have answered her. He should have reassured her that he was okay. Maybe the events which followed would not have occurred.

Immediately after she was ignored, he heard her quick footsteps drumming up the stairs. His door opened abruptly and she found him in a way he wished she had not. Tears streaming down his face, his nose excreting too much mucus to sniffle back, he hugged the knife into his chest, as if to seek comfort from the inanimate object. End the sadness. Give him warmth. It did not. And that was how he scratched slit his wrist off the list.

Lights. Shadows.

His mother made him promise that he wouldn't think of taking his life ever again. She carefully pulled the knife out of his tight grasp and, as if it physically burned her, she flung it away from them. It landed somewhere underneath his wardrobe, forever left alone. He was not planning on touching it again lest she caught him with it.

She warned him if he ever had suicidal pursuit again, she would sign him up for one of those suicidal groups where people talked about their killing spree problem. He promised her that he would never try to take his life ever again and as she pulled him into her chest, sobbing softly into his shoulder, he quickly uncrossed his fingers so she would not see the lie in his words.

At the door of the trailer, stood his father watching him with a look he could never decipher. Even to this day.

Lights. Shadows.

At some point, he stopped going to school. He used to until his parents decided to pull him out and just get him homeschooled.

His tutor, Freya came over on random days of the week to teach him the necessary information he needed to graduate from high school. At the time he did not know if he would even go to university, but his mother often said that she prayed every night so that he would become better. Spiritually. God bless her frail heart. She dreamt of the day when he would come back home as Dr Giovanni Lloyd.

If he could not even see himself in the future then did he honestly have a chance of making it to university? He humoured her though and that was what he felt bad about.

Lights. Shadows.

The second time he tried to kill himself was three months after he tried to end it all for the first time.

He made sure to do it on a Tuesday, that way he would not be found by Freya. He also chose to do it an hour after his parents left for work.

As usual, his mother yelled an, "I love you, baby" at him and told him where to get his breakfast once he got hungry. In the microwave. The door shut behind his father who gave him that familiar look he had given him ever since they found him in his room with a knife buried within the hollowness of his chest. He still had no idea what it meant.

A long hour dragged on as he sat in silence, contemplating whether he would actually carry it out, whether he was really going to kill himself.

This time around, he surprisingly did not chicken out…

And he awoke to pain.

Harsh, numbing pain.

The beeping was the first thing that alerted him that he was not dead. That he had survived and his ploy to kill himself had failed yet again.

A painful buzz drummed against his prefrontal lobe and a nauseating knot kept retying itself inside his stomach. His shifting around must have alerted his mother who instantly rushed over to him, forcing him to stay in bed. He did not need to look around to know that he was in a hospital. The look she gave him was gut-wrenching.

That was how he scratched overdosing on anti-depressants off his list.

A few weeks later, after his mother broke her oath of frustrated silence with him, she explained to him that Freya was the one who found him. She had apparently forgotten a textbook she needed with him or so she thought. Turned out the textbook was at her place all along. His mother kept telling him that it was the work of the Lord Jesus and Saviour. She sang praises and thanked God for leading his tutor to the house to pull him from his demise.

Freya quit a couple of days later.

Said something about needing to branch out.

He took that as her desperately needing to distance herself from him.

Lights. Shadows.

His parents signed him up for the suicidal group thing.

It was not as bad as he initially thought it was going to be. He managed to make friends there. People who understood what he was going through. It felt nice, that he was not so alone. He especially remembered Renee Barkley. She was not there just because she was suicidal. Her parents also wanted to put her addiction problem to an end. Which, he had to admit, was all in vain, because guess what she was doing most of the time at the sessions?

He really liked Renee.

She hated his guts; did everything in her power to make sure he had a bad day. That was what he liked the most about her. That she was such a whiny bitch. She could never shut up about her problems. And she would never shut up about the rest of their problems being minuscule in comparison. She was like a breath of fresh air, a real doll.

After a year of the sessions, his parents thought he had gotten much better and suggested that he stop going.

Four years later, he had almost tried every trick in the book to kill himself. For some unknown reason, he never succeeded. He either bitched out or some unknown force interfered and saved him from the welcoming hands of death.

Can't a boy just die in peace?

Guess, his parents should have left him to attend more suicide sessions. Who knows where he would be today?

Maybe he would be sitting around a circle of other suicidal people, speaking about his problem yet again with a stagnant smile on his face and still feeling like shit after his mum picked him up, asking him how it went on the drive back home. Maybe he would be getting better. Maybe he would want to live to see Renee again.

Perhaps he would not be sitting in this alleyway, as the darkness crept in around the edges of his vision and the lights from oncoming traffic cast shadows onto the walls, bleeding out.

Lights.

With each laboured breath, the world felt more distant, his senses fading.

Shadows.

It was always at the end that thoughts about the beginning popped up.

Meow.

His brows furrowed in confusion at the soft sound piercing through his haze, barely audible over the ringing in his ears. Mustering the last of his strength, he turned his head, blinking to focus his blurring gaze.

There, standing on the outskirts of the alley, was a black tabby kitten, its green eyes reflecting the dim light. It watched him curiously, head tilted to the side. For a moment, their eyes met and he felt a strange connection to the familiar feline. Opening his mouth, he tried to call out to beckon it closer but no sound came out past his lips, only a rattling gasp. Panting tiredly, he leaned his head back against the wall.

The kitten seemed to sense his need.

Slowly, cautiously, it crept forward and with the last bit of strength in his muscles, he lifted his hand to run his fingers over the fragile animal's soft fur. It seemed hesitant at first but eventually, it relaxed into my touch, small body brushing against his arm. The pain from his stab wound surprisingly faded away and he felt a surge of unexpected comfort at the contact.

The feline creature curled up beside him, lending its warmth in his final, fleeting moments.

With a shuddering breath, he closed his eyes, succumbing to death.