Do you know what it feels like to be in a horrible, horrible accident - one of those where, gauging from the wreckage, the people should have died - and lived? I do.

I stared death in the face, several times when I was a teenager. I should have died. I remember after it happened, and I looked down at my body covered in glass, ran my hands over my legs and my arms and thought that this was what it's like to be dead. Funny, I thought it would be ethereal, you know? Hues of angels, floating. Kinda like my page design. But I could feel my body with my hands and I was confused. I looked at my friend, uninjured but hysterical in the seat next to me, and I knew I was alive and trapped and I had to help her becase she was the only way I could help myself. I spoke softly to her, but strongly, and urged her to go find help. When the rescue team arrived and started to talking to me, I laughed. I had escaped death.

Another time, I sat in the passenger seat of a car, as we hung suspended over a bridge. We had been driving too fast on black ice. Maybe I was driving. I remember spinning out of control, like a matchbox car in the hands of a 5 year-old. We spun and we spun and we spun and my friend was howling and crying and I was just staring ahead, silent, watching us spin in the midst of this forest.

Finally, she must have jerked the steering wheel, because we broke through the bridge's wooden railing and the front two wheels slid easily over the bridge. The car rocked gently between the air beneath the front wheels, and the slippery wood under the back.

I don't think I breathed for seconds. Maybe a minute. I stared out the windshield into the darkness and I thought about how fucking cold it was going to be when the car went over the bridge and I would have to jump out, in the creek below. I thought about which leg I would allow to break when I jumped and hit the slippery rocks and embankment that laid below us. I thought about how I was going to have to take care of my friend because she was totally out of control.

I saw her lean forward and I whispered: Do. NOT. Move. Again. I remember her tensing and me thinking to myself that I should be careful not to scare her, because scaring her would push her to make a wrong move. Any move would have been wrong.

I never told anyone about the bridge. My parents would have killed me. I had forgotten about it until I started writing. It's funny, isn't it, how compassionate the human mind is to allow you to forget. Just, put it away. If you allow it to heal like that. Some people like to pick their wounds. Let them fester. Awaken them.

I like to put things away. I find no use in rehashing wounds. Picking scabs or wearing them on my sleeve for people to see.

Crying. Crying means you hurt. That you feel pain. I try not to cry much. I don't think it's productive, frankly. And why do I want to feel that pain. I see too much pain as it is. Children with swollen tummies in other countries. Children being shot in school, here, in America. Homeless. Drug addicts. People fighting terminal diseases.

And I should cry for what? My bad lot in life? Bullshit, people have had it much worse. Cry for what happened to me years ago? Why bother, what happened are simply stories now. Vague memories in a dusty box. Cry because I brought most of my dances with death upon myself, because once-upon-a-time I was bored and I wanted out of a dead-end town? Cry because now I realize my own mortality and I can't even believe that there were years when suicide was the dreamy answer?

Suicide makes me laugh. Why would I want to speed up the inevitable? When you are younger, everything is such a BIG DEAL. The Prom, dating, the position of your locker next to your best friend's. It's all a laugh now, but at the time, it was the end of the world! Suicide is not the answer. It's drawing the short stick in a contest. It's a cruel joke. It's a sad end.

In my mind, I've cheated death several times. I am lucky to be with you all. And for that, I have no reason to waste the moments that I am here with you. They are precious and few in the grand scheme of time. At any moment, death could come for me again. And maybe I won't be able to control the people in that situation with me. Maybe death won't decide to let me off so easy next time.

I'm not sure why I'm writing this. Maybe to explain to you why I think pettiness and self-punishment are so wrong and why I try to avoid those qualities, although, even I, sometimes succumb. Maybe to tell you to live for the moment. Maybe because I read so many suicidal people here and my mind reels wondering why they are running to end what could be so beautiful, if they worked hard to live.

Maybe I want to say that it's sometimes okay to have hard times that you put away and don't pick at. Maybe not everything needs to be analayzed and worked out?

Maybe I am tired of being in control, or of being the strong person. Maybe I want to empower you all to be strong too.

I want you, to want to live. And to live for the moment.

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