They say suicide isn't beautiful, well to me that's simply untrue because once you see it for yourself that changes the whole notion. The day I saw my mom take the old revolver out of my daddy's underwear drawer and put it against her forehead, that was the day that changed me forever. I was supposed to be playing but I had taken to racing trucks and was zooming them down the hallway back and forth. I stopped at the middle door, in between my bedroom and the other bedroom which was reserved for special people. My mom was supposed to be taking a nap but her door was slightly open and it's through that crack I watched as the bullet entered her brain right above her eye. I didn't scream or jump at that noise, or the blood that traced a rainbow on the new wallpaper my daddy had just installed the day before. No, I just stood there and went back to playing trucks stopping once in awhile to catch my breath or go look at my shiny new balloons in the kitchen. The police say it was three hours before anyone noticed, there wasn't anybody in the building at that late of an hour. Louise, our neighbor, knocked on the door when we hadn’t come out to get groceries  which was our Sunday ritual, but our ritual died that day with my mama. Our neighbor Louise was  a self-proclaimed psychic, but other than reading cards and tracing palms she wasn’t much of a psychic.
I was still playing with those trucks with a man in a dark police uniform kneeled down and picked me up and carry me out the door, the first time I've been out since Daddy's accident. They put me in a car and drove off, I wasn't hollering or making any noise at all, they couldn't get one word out of me. See, the last thing my daddy told me was to stay strong for my mama, and back then that meant keeping my lips sealed.
That was my childhood, thousands of foster homes people who didn't want me. They always said I was too quiet or they didn’t want me around their children because I scared them. I remember my first foster home, my new mama had let me play in the garden awhile. I came back in with a dead rat in tow, not just dead but meticulously sliced open and I had organized it’s guts into a sand bucket. That was the end of my first foster home. Find a place that I could call home until I was 18, fresh outta high school and foster care, dumped in a low-rent apartment and job at a Burger King, just two blocks away but one if you took the alley behind my apartment building. I was quiet one and no one really seemed to be attracted to me, that was, until I met Nancy. I never got the chance to tell her about mama or daddy but that never seemed to bother me. She was my first and my last girlfriend, she hung out with me for three months before she hung herself on my ceiling fan. it was on a Sunday, and like my mama raised me I was at church, with Nancy back home.  I took the long way home, walking up the wooden steps that led to my apartment, ran my fingers over the worn grooves in the stairwell. I jiggled my key into the broken lock on my door with a sloppily painted five on it which was expertly designed by my landlord.[ this sentence can be more clear  I pushed open the door, which slammed into the dent that was made by all of the times that my key didn’t quite work. I sighed and placed my keys and wallet on the grimy, sticky countertop without much thought.
It only occurred to me mere moments later of the deafening silence in my apartment, the suffocating heat causing rivulets of sweat to pour down my back. My bedroom door was shut, which was odd because I always kept it open to make my apartment cold because it had the only window in the place. I got up, abandoning my position at my threadbare couch, from the thrift shop downtown, stumbling over the bump in the carpet that’s been there for what seems like centuries. I pushed on my door, which was trapped against something. I slammed my weight against the thin, wooden door which broke on contact. The first thing I saw where Nancy’s eyes staring blankly at me. She had clumsily tied an extension cord around her neck which had bruised purple and blue along where the cord stretched. I sighed, crouched down and phoned the police, and resumed my position on the couch. Again, I was escorted to a police car but the seat was not as comfortable as I had remembered. The car was dark and musty, reminiscent of the dark alleyways I skirted every night. I was put in a cell, but I didn’t know why, I hadn’t killed Kelly. She was pushed to the part of my brain where I never let myself go, the one with Daddy and Mama. The jail looked a lot like the one I had to go into with Mama to look the murderer in his eyes, but while I had been expecting anger and hatred, I got tear-filled, sad eyes as he pounded on the glass divide, separating my Mama and I from the person that killed my dad. I heard some snippets of conversations, like the one when the big man came to our door to take us to the hospital and how Mama collapsed on the cold, white floor of that sterile white hospital when my Daddy’s heart gave out and the monotonous beep bounced off the walls. My Mama told me that he went to get my birthday cake, the one that she had forgotten, and when he was turning at the stoplight a car sped through and sent him straight out of his car. Mama said that he wanted to get a good place in heaven before they were all taken but know I knew she was just trying to make the accident seem like a minor thing when it really wasn’t. Daddy woke up one last time, but I could see the cloudiness behind his eyes which were half hidden behind a white bandage wrapped around his head. That was the last time we were together as a family, it was only two weeks later that my mama shot a bullet into her head, and my balloons were still sitting on our table amid the sea of bills and condolences. The kitchen was a dead zone, filled with the remnants of my forgotten birthday, the fridge overflowing with lasagnas and casseroles, and the sink filled with days of dirty dishes. I never remember what happened in those weeks, I missed school and church, sitting with my trucks day in-and-out.
I remembered all of this, it came rushing back the day I was sitting on the roof of my apartment building, my legs dangling over the edge that dropped to nothingness. I wrote the last few words on the backside of the fluorescent pink flyer I’d picked up from the community center’s billboard. I finished the letter with; I’m sorry, I can’t handle this life anymore. The letter was useless, I had nobody left in this world. I folded the paper and placed it into my pocket, I knew what was going to happen when I jumped. How if I by some miracle survived, that the possibilities of waking up would be slim to none and I didn’t care because I had nobody. But, if I did die, it would likely be by impact or by bleeding out. I tucked these bits of knowledge in my brain and sent a short prayer to heaven. I was going to heaven to be with Daddy and Mama, even though my death would be less graceful than either of theirs. I pushed my hands flat against the cold, steel roof trim and fell, seventy five feet.