My energy has left me. All of my hope has vanished. Excruciating pain is devouring me, like a hungry piranha. I am perishing. A cold knife penetrates my heart. I am lost at sea. I can no longer navigate. My life is dark. The fire is not burning.

I am not worth anything. I am but a grain of sand on a desolate beach. I am nothing in the eyes of one man or woman that walks upon the earth. I am trash. I am not even recyclable. I am unworthy of being loved. Surely, not one person would miss me if I sank, slowly, slowly down into the heart of the sea.

Fear is creeping in and it is crawling through my veins. I don’t like to be invisible. I am the only person left on my island in my heart. Everybody else just drifted away. I have no shelter from the storm.

I am starving for love, for affection, for arms to wrap around me and for soft words to be spoken in my ear, to tell me everything is going to be okay. Oh, how I wish to quench my thirst, my desire, for love. My mouth is dry. I am out in the cold.

The salty air swirls around me in the dark night air. All is silent—the silent moment before death can be heard. The stars and the moonlight are dancing on the sea, calling me. I can hear the waves touching the shore. I can feel them reaching out for me. A dark, deep sea of excruciating loneliness is found in my heart.

It is this moment in time when my world grows dark. The sun does not shine for me. The stars have gone out and the moon never shines. My world inside my mind is dark. My heart holds up its shield and its sword. I am numb. I am frozen. I cannot feel anything anymore. My sadness, my happiness, my anger, and my joy—all of my emotions have frozen within me. I can no longer cry. My eyes do not shine. My hollow heart wants to hide from it all. My crushing pain is leading me to my last final escape—to suicide. Death is calling me.

Should I swim now—far out to sea and take my last breath and sink into the depths as far as I can go? Should I let the river of salty water fill my nose, my mouth, my lungs, and my heart? I could vanish into the deep dark sea in the night and nobody will ever know.

I am alone—who will rescue me now? Who will save me from this shipwreck? Where will I find shelter from the storm? I find my thoughts inside a cave, with the water rising from the tide, into the dark caverns of my mind. My escape route is cut off. There is no place to go. Courage and inner strength do not reside in my bones, I feel empty.

I feel alone, so very, very alone. I have pushed everyone out of my life, one by one, and they are all gone. I am alone. All alone on an uninhabited island, I sit in the sand. I have escaped. I have escaped from them all. I ran away from the people and the places that pierced me with deep wounds that made me bleed.

I have taken a small plane, then a larger one, and yet another larger one. I have taken a bus and another bus, another plane, another bus, and finally I have arrived at my destination, on a desolate island. This is where I escape to—I have no other place I can run to. It is as far as I can go. I cannot go any further. The haunting shadow of my pain from when I was a child follows me everywhere—everywhere I go. I cannot leave it behind. It will not stay behind. It follows me everywhere, every step that I take, never missing a beat. I try so hard to get rid of it by leaving the people that pierced me, by leaving them behind—but pain keeps torturing my mind, screaming that I am worthless and unlovable. I want to die. I want to end all my pain—once and for all. I want to kill my pain. I want to murder it.

I can no longer navigate through the effects of the bitter taste of abuse. It sends me riding on an emotional journey, until I am lost, inside my heart. It keeps building pressure becoming more and more painful. It is overwhelming. I feel alone and isolated. It seems like it is impossible to ever solve my problems. My pain crushes me and I have the feeling that only death will stop it. I take another drink. It bites me and stings my throat, as it takes its journey through my body. Feelings of hopelessness overwhelm me. I have no one to listen to me. I need to break my silent secrets that eat me alive, like maggots in gangrene.