I knew where my father kept his gun.

  Top-drawer, bedside table.

  I'd lost track of the times I opened that drawer and found it empty. But I knew it was only a matter of when, not if, my father finally forgot to take his personal protection with him to his job in the ghetto. I drove to his house almost every day in my mom's car, searching for Schrodinger's gun.

  On the bedside table sat a framed photo of the day my father had taken me to the shooting range for the first time. I could hear the rules of safety he'd drilled into my head like a sergeant, "Never point the barrel at anybody, loaded or unloaded. Always act like it's loaded and keep it pointing down range. Never look down the barrel." Things that companies have to put on their products for stupid people, basically. The bulky, noise-canceling ear protection turned my little blonde head into a sandwich. Behind those unflattering function-over-fashion glasses were blue eyes that would learn to hate the prison they saw in the mirror. God, what an ugly kid. Though if I still had that summer hair, maybe I would've kept the sunny disposition of that carefree smile. It turned out that looks weren't everything; in the reflection of my father's bedroom window I actually looked above average, but the last time I'd truly felt average had been when I was that younger self, smiling back at me from the picture.

  My father's cleanliness remained military-grade despite living on his own with nobody to impress, yet the inevitable beginnings of dust revealed the exact place where the picture frame had been sitting. I returned it like a thief planting a fake diamond in stead of the real one. With the same steady hands I pulled the drawer smoothly out. It was heavier than yesterday.

  Some people always want to know how one could find themselves where I was, port-mortem. Why someone decides to end their life. For those people, my parents, a couple of friends, the morbidly curious, I had prepared a hand-written note for their convenience.

  I'm sorry.

  I can't take it any longer.

  The handgun weighed more, took more conviction to hold than I'd expected, even without the magazine in it.

  My childhood was better than I could've asked for. Thanks mom and dad. But life has only been getting worse since then, and it will never get better because you can never go back. That time was the best it will ever be, when our family was together, when there seemed to be an answer to any problem. But this is nobody else's fault really. That's just the way life is, and I guess I'm not okay with it.

  No matter how much I'd thought about it these past few months, I was surprised to have gotten this far. I loaded the magazine and released the slide to chamber a round. The metallic click-clack drew extra attention to the silence of the house.

  I put the cold barrel in my mouth. My tongue instinctively went to investigate this alien object. Was this what it had been like for my ex-girlfriend, just warmer? I thought softer as well, but I wouldn't have been soft.

  Huh. It turned out Freud had been onto something with the whole death and sex drive stuff.

  Where's the adventure in half a century of wage slavery? I mean, what is there left to look forward to—burying my own two parents, the only people that ever truly cared about me, after they waste their retirement sick and dying? Or needing to wear diapers again when I'm finally deemed unfit for labor and put in an old folks' home where nobody will visit me? Not that I'll ever have the good fortune of retiring. I only want one thing whenever I wake up now, and that's to go back to sleep.

  Against the background of silence, there was another noise. Was it the air conditioning kicking on? Despite all the times I'd been to my father's house since he moved here after the divorce, I'd never stayed long enough to become acquainted with its groans and rumblings.

  I haven't been able to control anything in life. I tried, I went to school for four years, worked harder than ever, got my degree, and in the end I hate life more than at any point before. That's what I get for trying. I feel bad that I wasted everybody's help.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  If I could, I would make my life everything I want it to be. Not just for me, but for you, that way you wouldn't have to worry anymore. But I can't do that. All I can control is not waking up again.

  I know I'm a disappointment. It might be selfish, but I hope you'll understand and forgive me one day.

  Nothing feels okay.

  Love,

  "Warren?"

  As I heard my father's voice echoing through the house from the door leading to the garage, I put the loaded pistol back into its drawer, closed it, and crept to the end of the hall where the main upstairs bathroom was. What the Hell is he doing here, I thought. He was supposed to be at work.

  "Warren!"

  "Yeah, I hear you. I was in the bathroom," I called back to him, looking around the corner.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked gruffly.

  Oh boy.

  "I was looking for something," I bullshitted without any attempt at stumbling over specificity. Actually, it wasn't bullshit, but more a lie by omission.

  "Since you're not doing anything, you can help me look for my gun then. I swore I brought it with me this morning but when I got to work it was-"

  I could hear the Type-A personality in his voice that I'd been privy to since birth.

  "...like it had just disappeared. I only had time to tear the inside of my car apart like a damn crazy person before I needed to clock-"

  He wandered the house, his hard and rapid footsteps stomping around the living room furniture, the kitchen table, the dining room, the counters. He went on and on.

  "Are you sure you even grabbed it out of your room?" I interrupted. "I'll go look."

  He sighed, and answered with, "Now I'm tracking dirt through the whole house, I just fucking cleaned the floors two days-"

  From the drawer I grabbed his handgun again, using my shirt to try and wipe off where my mouth had been. I thought for sure he was going to give me a lecture for handing it to him loaded.

  "You know you're not on your mom's car insurance."

  "Yeah," I said, bracing myself.

  "I have to go, I'm on my lunch break right now. Lock the doors when you leave."

  "Alright," I said.

  He closed the door behind him, just shy of slamming it. I waited and listened for the car door, which he also shut in a manner just shy of slamming it. Then through the front window I watched him drive away in a manner just shy of speeding. That was my father, pushing everything from patience to blood pressure to their limits. The garage door finished closing after he had already disappeared down the street of the subdivision. Silence once more.

  To calm myself, I tried looking through the books that I hadn't had room for at my mother's house. My eyes kept gravitating toward the works of Ernest Hemingway and Yukio Mishima on the shelf. Hemingway and Mishima—both had killed themselves. Not that I'd known that from just reading their work, although there could've been some unconscious signal that drew me to them, a mysterious synchronicity from the universe. Yet all anybody seemingly wanted to talk about when it came to Mishima was how he was an openly-closeted homosexual—however that works—and Hemingway was a son of a bitch, but I couldn't have cared less about that, I admired other aspects of their writing. Well, it was weird to say that when you've only read the translations... if I could've read the original Japanese, I wonder if I'd see Mishima's writing differently, for better or for worse.

  Hemingway was the one who had really set me on a love for stories. He'd made me want to become a writer too. I even tried journalism for a while, until I mistakenly believed a better option might've been teaching English to the country's dim future. My parents never supported my artistic pursuits, after all.

  Anyway, this distraction proved to be of no use. If anything, it reminded me even more of what had just happened minutes ago, the fact that I'd been a trigger-pull away from not even thinking everything that I was thinking. I had hesitated before my dad unexpectedly came home. Why?

  I pulled the hand-written note out of my pocket and read it again.

  "But this is nobody else's fault really..."

  Ah, that's what it was.

  I needed a new plan that made it my fault, and my fault alone. It couldn't be my father's gun; I couldn't do that to him regardless of our strained relationship. I needed to get my own gun, and not with some money my mother had given me but money that I'd earned myself.

  My parents would blame themselves no matter what, even though I didn't want them to. That's how people are when it comes to suicide. I don't know if it's human nature, but they wait until it's too late. These are the people who, by pure strokes of compounding luck, cannot even conceive of what it is like to want to kill yourself. I myself can vaguely recall that blissful slumber; now I've got a case of existential insomnia. What help could these ignorant people possibly be when their first instinct is to flee from the depressive, suicidal thoughts you share with them? Honestly, I would just be worried about waking them up from their dream. That would be an evil thing to do. The good thing to do would be to keep far away from the normal people, quarantined with my mental leprosy. Meanwhile, the people send their own elderly parents to nursing homes, not so that they can be nursed back to health but so that they can go die somewhere out of sight, out of mind. Likewise, mental lepers like myself are told to stay home. "Don't come to work with that attitude," they say. "You know, you're missing a lot of work," they say.

  A few people might tell someone like me that they cared, but platitudes were basically the same as saying, "Keep suffering because it would make me sad if you stopped." Or they wanted me to take a pill, wear a mask, none of which solved my problem either. Everybody is different, but my issue was not some figment of the imagination, some phantom of a theory involving brain chemicals. Suicide was a permanent solution to real problems that nobody could offer an alternative for, and I hated my problems. There was no restart or do-over button, there was no new life lottery. I was stuck being me, Warren, the son of divorced parents, a 23-year-old loser living with his mom, living a life where my best intentions were no better than flailing and thrashing about desperately in quicksand.

  So, tomorrow I would look for a dead-end job, one of the foremost things that made me want to kill myself.