text: CW: Suicide *** To increase my self-discipline, I started taking freezing cold showers at the age of fourteen. Every morning, I would wake up, brush my teeth, and step into a waterfall of icicles. It wasn’t a pleasant thing, but my mother never complained that I’d used all the hot water like my brother did when he was my age. Our house is old, built before the constitution was signed. Heat is a rarity. But that’s hardly to do with the gaps in the bricks. I started doing this when I failed a math test, and my father told me that if I’d just studied harder, tried harder, worked harder, then I would not have failed. He was wrong. My father always thought he was right, but he was wrong. Numbers to me are not tangible, whatever they taught me about numbers in elementary school didn’t stick. But Still, I started taking freezing cold showers. A lot of websites will list the benefits of cold showers. They reduce muscle soreness, improve your circulation, and hydrate your skin. In a locker room, I hear girls talking about how they never wash their face in the shower, it dries out your skin, they say. Perhaps that serves as a simple explanation, but nothing has ever been so simple for me. After a year of freezing, I saw rows and rows of red cuts on my friend’s arm. We were fifteen, sitting in the study hall. It was winter and the edge of her sleeve was pulled back like an invisible hand moved it, like someone wanted me to see. I told the school counselor. My friend never spoke to me after that. I wish I could tell her that she and I are twin souls. That my shivering pale hands and her red bleeding arms are both a form of self-destruction. I have ice water in my bloodstream and she has iron on the inside of her sleeves. She and I were twin souls, didn’t we drink from the same can of sprite, that night sitting on someone else’s porch? “I’m cold,” She said. I told her that I didn't get cold. Not easily. I lied. I lied again and again to her. I wish I could have told her that but I won't even tell myself. Either way. She killed herself last spring. During the celebration of life assembly, I ran math equations in my head, trying to figure out how I could have spent those two hours working on an essay. My parents would kill me if I failed that essay. If they got there before I did. Warm summer evenings and the rattling of my radiator, hissing like a snake and shaking like a leaf. They both mean nothing to me. I ace every test, my grades are good. One day, in a difficult math class my father insisted I take, I got a B-, and that day I didn't walk home. My legs carry me out into the forest. New England winters are brutal. There is snow shining on the ground, and the yards look like the surface of the moon. In these woods are where witches upon witches were hanged. New England winters are brutal. I sit against one of those old stone walls, the ones they tell us American soldiers hid behind during the Revolutionary War. I’m not a soldier. My grandfather fought in World War Two and my brother tried to join the military when he was eighteen, but my mother wouldn’t let him. There’s nothing noble about us. My coat and scarf are hung on a tree, waving in the wind like a woman from a ship leaving port. My boots go next, set into the snow like a time capsule my brother and I buried in the yard. We filled it with pictures and VHS tapes and buried it beneath a weeping willow tree. The tree fell years ago, that tin box tangled in its roots. I lay in the snow for hours, feeling my limbs go numb and my brain slow down. My heart, always defiant and always struggling, beats like a rabbit’s. It tries so desperately to pump blood to my vital organs, to save me. My breath is cold, a woolen cloud against the dark backdrop of a starless sky. Finally, mercifully, sleep overtakes me. As a child in elementary school, between concerned child meetings and flashcards with stark, black numbers, they taught me how to pull myself out of a frozen lake. How to put blankets in the back of a trunk. To pile blankets on a bed and test ice before you walk on it. They told me the one thing you should never do is fall asleep. Somehow, it feels good to finally break a rule. Some hunters find my body. They take my coat and boots, leave the scarf. My mother wrote my name on the tag of my jacket, despite my insistence that I’m not a child anymore. “In case it gets lost” She said. I don’t think she ever thought, holding that sharpie and scrawling her child’s name, it would ever be used to identify a body. In the investigation, they will ask about me. They will ask my parents and my friend if anything seems off. They say I was always so hard-working, always very disciplined, and respectful. I never broke any rules, except for a key rule. My mother will sob into her hands, and my brother will see my pale face and find it incomprehensible. My father will regret every time he told me off for having low grades. Ha, no he won't. He'll see this simply as another failure. My teachers will find the news shocking, my friends will feel a pang of pressing guilt, like stones on their shoulders. Like I did. I get up quickly, frantically. Swears turn to steam as I say them. I tug my boots back on and jog home, taking my coat and leaving my scarf to hang in the tree-like the body of another, unfortunate girl. My mother screams at me for staying out so late. I trudge up to my room and pile blankets on my bed. My head is spinning. I wonder how the cold has affected me, everything seems foggy. I keep checking my fingers, which are still there, and my toes, which are still there. My heart races like the dog chasing a rabbit, its master shouting at it to go faster, work harder. I let my heartbeat slow. For maybe the first time in four years, I do not have a stress-dream about school. In the morning, I wake up, brush my teeth, and turn the shower knob all the way to the blue. I think of rows and rows of graves of girls hung on trees, I think of rows and rows of bleeding cuts on an arm, and I think of rows and rows of straight As, stark black letters, signifying nothing. What was I doing it for? Just to kill myself? I take that cold metal handle and I pull it back all the way until hot water rattles through the pipes.