I remember as a child, a room situated in the middle of the woods of the town I grew up in. This room was nothing more than some blatantly fake, overly dark painted wooden walls that held together what seemed to be like too many windows to fit in one room. Every time my mom would take me to this room I would struggle with its purpose.

Then one day, it rained.

Suddenly, there was nothing. The outside world sunk into solitude as the rain tapped in a trance-like state atop the tin roof that held the structure of the building together. The beads of water blissfully ran down the sides of the glass panes, like vertical waves of bliss.

I was at peace. Complete, beautiful, perfect peace.

But I have that feeling no more.

I have spent the last four years subconsciously trying to drink myself to death; I prefer wine. Usually, it’s a box and half of sunset blush or a box of chardonnay, as the strengths of both of these libations differ.

The strength of the chardonnay usually comes up to surprise me around 9:00 p.m. when the sudden rush of helplessness, like you’ve crossed a line you can’t come back from, kicks in. My head waves around slowly, my body slumps like a helpless ragdoll at the mercy of any and all who come in contact with it, and my eyes wander to nowhere in particular, like they’re searching for something real but to no avail.

With the sunset blush, I can usually time the “rush of no return,” as I call it, with my natural sleep cycle. This allows me the brief little lie that I am in control, something I have desperately sought but haven’t yet found.

Sadly, my significant other knows the schedule:She grabs me by the shirt, all 250 worthless, shameful pounds of my rotting flesh, and guides me up to the bedroom where she lays me down to sleep. Hoping that tomorrow will be different..

It won’t be, and it kills me inside that I am too weak to fight for her, and I am too ashamed to open up to her my pain and have her fight for me. I know she knows my pain. I know she can feel it inside of me. But, ultimately, it’s not on her to save me; that distinction falls on the shoulders of only myself, and I don’t feel like saving me.

I have grown tired of lying to myself that I don’t want to die. I wake up each day with a new little crick in my system; my feet are little colder, my skin a little more pale, and lately I have been dealing with a chronic cough that appears to have gotten no better, but no worse, over the last few months.

Each day I feel like I have taken another inch closer to death, but it’s taking too long for my impatient mind and tired heart.I am, writing this letter to anyone who is willing to take the time to read it, astonished by the relentlessness of the human body and the human mind. Both of which have taken a beating for the last several years. The body, sadistically tortured by my eating with no regard and drinking to no end. The mind, suffering the consequences of my weakness that allows fatalism and negativity to override it every day and give in to whatever impulses are driving me to die.

But each day, I wake up and wonder why I did.

I wish I had some clear cut timetable to tell you of when it all went wrong, or why I am really doing what I am doing. I wish I could tell you how I went from a healthy, happy three-sport athlete in High School, to an overweight, slowly dying mid-30s man with -600 in his bank account whose quietly drowning in debt and doing nothing about it but drinking away the pain.

But the truth of the matter is the only things that run through my head when I wake up are the fears of tomorrow and the challenge of making it through the day without any pain.

All I want, each and every day, is to make it through the day without the world falling down on me; which, in my mind, I am inevitably sure it will do eventually. And the problem with this whole mindset is that my real problems, ones that I could have probably tackled a long time ago, and maybe, possibly, even dealt with, don’t get any better. They only get more difficult each day, creating more problems due to my apathy, and further strengthen my irrational position that there is no way out.

And, by the way, I am sure there is some way out of all the mess I am in, but by the time you get to where I am at now, honestly, you are tired of fighting; you’re tired of waking up every day with the weight of the world on your shoulders and a mind that is conjuring a million ways your life will be ruined today.

You just desperately seek silence; seek nothing.

I don’t want to be numb anymore, I want to be nothing. I have been too scared my whole life to say no to anyone, and it’s slowly eaten away at me with each promise I make and each person I let down. I watch my girlfriend hug me in the morning, silently begging me to take a stand to others, and most importantly myself. She desperately wants to see me take control of my life. But I have let others control me too long to remember how to do it, and the guilt and shame of my subconscious narcissism, the thought that everyone and everything depends on me, has taken a toll on too many people I love.

As they say, the path to hell is paved with good intentions, and I am just waiting to see my road.

I have spent the whole day thinking about that room in the woods, hoping, wishing, that the sweet song of the rain on the tin roof will return, one last time.

Maybe tonight.