Teenagers should never have to think about dying. Or being dead. Or a future without someone. And yet here I am at a funeral. I'm only 15. She was only 15. And now she'll forever be frozen in everyone's mind as a pretty 15 year old. Not a bad way to be remember, besides the whole suicide thing. I suppose that puts a damper on it all. Knowing that she had everything and then she went and threw it away. I thought about dying a lot after that, about it happened, if I could have stopped it, if anyone could have prevented it.

I've never felt worse in my life. Everyone I know is here, crying and hugging their friends, making them promise to never leave them and make them go through this again. And of course they all say they promise, how could they even think of making their best friends go through something so horrible like this again?

Fast forward about seven months, and another girl isn't at school. She's at a hospital, not allowed to leave until she calms down and realizes what she almost did, what she almost made everyone else go through. The first one had affected her so badly, she saw no other way out. And yet she had made a promise too. Does that make her a bad person? No. It just means that everyone needs help.

And then there was me. Like I said, teenagers shouldn't have to think about dying. They shouldn't have to think about themselves dying. And yet I was picturing myself dying, and I was the one who was doing it to myself. I had a plan. It was a little rough around the edges, I still wasn't exactly sure of anything. And I never thought about anyone else. I didn't think about how my little sister would feel, or my parents, or my best friends. They would probably blame it on themselves, now that I look back. And the sad thing is that it had nothing to do with them. It wasn't their fault. It was mine.

I can look back now at my darkest hours, at the moments I hated myself. I hated going through the motions of it all. I trying to live up to expectations. I hated having to pretend that everything was ok, when I was so broken inside. I hated people for thinking they knew me. Because they didn't. How could anyone have known me when I didn't even know myself? I can't let myself remember all this on the bad days, which still come every now and again, I can't fall back into my old ways of thinking. On good days, I realize how stupid it would have been. How I would have lost so much, how I wouldn't have been able to do what I'd always dreamed about. Even today, there's still so much I want to experience. But all it takes is one bad day, and everything I've worked for goes up in shambles. Stringing together more than a week of good days is a huge accomplishment for me. More often are the weeks that flip flop between the two people I have become. And then there are the weeks where the old me takes over completely. But I'm stronger now. I can fight back. I know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and that when my day comes, I'll be ready for it. I won't have to plan it out, it'll happen as it was meant to be. And I'll have lived my life before I get my wings. Somedays I wish it would come sooner than it should. On the good days, I wish I could live for eternity.

At the moment, I'm glad for every extra day I've gotten to experience. I can't wait until I get out of high school and move away to college. I'm trying to be a normal seventeen year old. I make mistakes sometimes, and things don't always go as planned, and I get really stressed out, and I'm pushed to the edge, but I've got the courage to face life now and see what the next day brings.