For the third time that night, he picked up the shotgun and placed it in his mouth. He hadn't bothered to check and see if it was even loaded. He didn't care. Knowing that he had the power to remove himself was enough.
At almost seventeen years old, starting late, still going through "the change", he was alone. He would go to school, talk to his friends, or at least the people he felt close to. He didn't feel like he had any "true" friends. He never knew what it was like to trust someone with a secret, or to be called by someone in the middle of the week, "just to talk."
Mark never had a girlfriend. He had liked quite a few girls, but always lacked the courage to do anything about it. At night, he would lie in bed and fantasize about what it would be like. Not to have sex, but just to hold a girl close.
He saw the others around him. They all had people they cared about. He didn't, and never had. This thought haunted him. He knew he was a good person, and that given the opportunity, he could show a "special someone" that he could be good to them. Treat them well. He longed for someone to say "I love you" to.
Home was no better. His mother worked, a lot. Actually, she worked too much in his opinion. He had never met his father, and never really been upset by it. When someone asked, he would brush the question off. But, somewhere deep inside, he would wonder if it was his fault that the man had left. He would silently think that maybe his father had known he would be a loser, and chose to leave rather than be disappointed by an unworthy son.
It had always been just he and his mom. He liked the arrangement most of the time. He had been taught at an early age to take care of himself. He started doing his own laundry at nine and was cooking meals for he and his mother by 10. Cooking was what he liked. He tried to get his mother’s attention with special dishes, timed perfectly so that they would be ready when she arrived home. Most of the time, they would sit and eat in silence, or she would tell him about things that had happened at work. Rarely did she compliment him on the food, but he understood. She is tired, he would think, and doesn't have the time to worry about me. It didn't bother him, at least, not outwardly. He knew that she loved him, and that one day she would realize what a great person her son had turned out to be.
He could never quite shake his feeling of loneliness though. It went away sometimes, or at least he forgot to think about it. When he was at a party he was invited to (a rare occasion, and one that he looked forward to more than anything) or when he would sit at the lake by his house, fishing pole in hand, headphones on blasting whatever tape he had chosen that day, it would fall to the back of his mind, and lie there for a while, unnoticed. But it always returned, and usually stronger for it's time at rest.
He sat there, on his bed, wearing his favorite cut-offs and a T-shirt from the one concert he had gone to, almost a year ago. While sitting there, tears had started falling down his cheeks. Not a lot, he wasn't bawling. They were silent, as he was most of the time. The taste of metal filled his mouth, and he thought maybe he had cut the inside of his mouth. He could taste something a bit coppery, like when he bit his tongue and drew blood. Between the gun and the blood, he was experiencing a taste he never had before. He reflected on it a moment before his next thought.
He knew that he probably had some purpose on the earth, but after years of trying to figure it out, he still didn't know. He wondered about the shotgun again, whether it was loaded or not. He couldn't see his mother keeping it in the house loaded. She kept it because it was his grandfather's, not as a weapon.
Another ten minutes passed, his mind racing between the thought that maybe he had the ultimate cure in his hands, and whether he was strong enough to use it.
Slowly, he reached down to the trigger, and rested his thumb on it. He gently pushed it down, and understood that it would take quite a bit pressure if he decided to go through with it.
He closed his eyes, and forced the thin metal lever backwards.
On a Tuesday night, in a suburban neighborhood, at 9:36 PM, a young man committed suicide. The rest of the world was dealing with it's own problems, and except for the people on the block, no one knew that it had occurred. His mother got home from a business dinner thirty minutes later, arriving in time to see the paramedics place her only child, the one she loved more than life itself, in a black plastic bag.
