Like Dreaming, Backwards
By Kellie Powell

This play is a work in progress. It has not been finished. It is a series of monologues and scenes about the suicide of a young college student named Nell. Leah is Nell's mother. The play also includes monologues from Nell's acquaintance, Yale, and her friend, Natalie.

NELL

Have you ever had a dream and suddenly, you realize what's happening doesn't make any sense - and you realize that you're dreaming. And you realize: if you know that you're dreaming, then you can control what's going to happen next?

When I have an episode, it's exactly like that - only backwards.

Sometimes, when things are bad, I sit and make lists of reasons not to kill myself. My mom is always at the top of the list. I love her, and I know that if I died, she would be devastated. I try to stay alive for her sake. Next is usually my little sister. She's had enough go wrong in her life. And it would be sad to die without ever really knowing her. Next, I list friends of mine. But when you want to kill yourself, sometimes it's hard to think rationally about who your friends are. You can think that they all hate you behind your back. You can even think, sometimes, that secretly, they want you dead. I'm not saying it makes any sense. But you can think it, anyway.

The first time I tried to kill myself, I was ten. When I woke up the next morning, I was so relieved. I was so happy that I hadn't succeeded. I didn't tell anyone. And for a while, I was happy to be alive. A year later, I tried again. I've lost count of how many times I've tried. They were all cries for help. I tried to poison myself, overdose on sleeping pills, hang myself, drown myself, suffocate myself, and throw myself into traffic.

Now, when I wake up after taking every sleeping pill in arm's reach and washing it down with a bottle of wine, I'm never, ever relieved. I feel trapped. I feel desperate. I feel like even more of a failure. And I have even wondered if the reason that I can't kill myself is because I'm already dead and in Hell. Depression is a living Hell. There's no better description than that.

But your physical drive to live can undermine your mind's desire to die. Your instincts to breathe are hard to overcome. You can't bear another second of misery - but your heart just refuses to stop beating. It has some nerve.

It's hard to tell the people I love that I want to die. So I spend a lot of my time and energy pretending that everything's okay. I make jokes. And when I ended up in the hospital, it was almost a relief. Because I didn't have to act for anyone, anymore. I just cried all day. And no one took it personally. No one wanted to blame themselves. I could cry to my heart's content, and it didn't hurt anyone's feeling. The honesty was refreshing.

But then, I started to look at the other patients around me, and I started to realize that I was never, ever going to get better. No therapy was going to help me cope any better than I already do every day on my own. No medication will ever fix me. I will always have depression. I can fight it. I can achieve all kinds of things. I can make everyone think I'm normal, that I'm coping, that I'm okay. But I've never been okay. I'll never be okay. I will always be one bad day away from suicide. Until I'm dead. I spend my life trying to delay what I know is inevitable.

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