I didn't try to kill myself. Yes, in that text I said I thought I was dying, but it was never my intention to disappear completely. There was a lot of blood, and I was scared, and I wanted someone to come save me, but in retrospect, I didn't need it. Physically, I would have been fine with a good night's sleep and some bandages and Neosporin. I would have worn long sleeves and carried on with my life in the state of numbness I'd grown accustomed to. But I am not my physical being. I am a series of chemical reactions in my skull cavity that decide how I handle specific situations, and that aspect of myself wouldn't have been fine. It would probably already be back in the same place it was a week ago. And a year ago. And two years ago.

However, someone did come save me. My brother; my knight in shining bathrobe, come to rescue me via blueberry waffles and alerting my mother of the bloody towel on my bed. I still haven't thanked him properly for that, but I think he knows. I think he can tell I'm thankful by the way I say "good" when he asks how I'm doing rather than "fine." He hasn't brought up the incident since it happened. I'm thankful for that, too.

I'm thankful for a lot of things now that I never really thought to be thankful for- things I never really appreciated. Like how good it feels to wake up at noon. The light coming in through the window made my saltwater-flooded eyes sting, and I could feel my heartbeat in my forehead like a Skrillex song, but I was awake. Have you ever thought about how amazing that is? The fact that you're alive? You're literally a sack of flesh and guts and water yet you've somehow managed to survive in a world full of things that blow up or poison you or attack you from the inside out. That's incredible!

The day following the text and the blood and the waffles, my dad talked a lot. But it wasn't the usual meaningless babbling of an emotionally distraught parent. It was really talking. Talking about things that most people are scared to mention. He talked about hating oneself and about feeling worthless and about dying and the selfishness of Death, come to steal the ones we love. He talked like he wasn't afraid of any truth, regardless of how bleak. It was the only thing that made me feel like things would be okay. By acknowledging the hopelessness of humans as a whole we manage to exhume a strength that is buried within all of us individually. Deep inside every human being is this strength to carry on despite how futile our existence on this earth is, this strength to make our time here slightly less insignificant.

I have begun calling the evening of the stained-red towel The Rebirth. I had been someone other than myself for too long, and maybe it took killing that version of myself to find the real me trapped inside. Maybe the only way to rid ourselves of the things we do not want to be is to destroy ourselves entirely and start over with hugs from our mothers and Strawberry Shortcake band-aids and homemade breakfast pastries. There is a sort of wisdom to naïveté; a fire of wonder, which must be fed to keep it from burning out.

Every day that I wake up is a day that I have been granted existence by the awful grace of the universe. Every thing I see or hear or experience is the result of billions of perfectly sequenced coincidences. Every time the sun goes down the sky puts on a light show to promise that it will come back up. Isn't there something spectacular about that? This life may not be perfect, or great, or even good, but it's okay, and that's something. Maybe there is nothing more to life than the knowledge of being alive, and the small, commonplace wonders that come with that. Maybe it's okay to fall apart so long as we put ourselves together as something better. Maybe we, ourselves, are all we have, but maybe that is enough.