The pain began a couple of weeks after Mandy and I broke up. It was a pain that was completely middle class and it was a pain that I was familiar with and it was a pain that pissed me off. She gave me back everything that I’d given her, and I deleted her number and completely cut her off.

I’m a grown up now, so I didn’t do anything tremendously embarrassing with the pain. I kept going to work, I kept going to boxing. I kept the pain tiny, miniscule, a small, dense marble inside me somewhere.

A bit later I met this girl in the gym. I called her Mouse, and one day she texted me: “Do you ever want to die?”

“Not really.”

“What would be a cool way to kill myself?”

I thought about it. “Make it clean. But don’t make people have to worry about you being missing. Cut yourself in the bathtub perhaps.”

“I don’t like blood. How about if I hang myself in my room?”

“That could work. But do you have anything in your house to hang yourself with?”

She didn’t reply for a bit. “I just checked. No :(”

“Too bad.”

“LOL.” I didn’t reply, so she added: “How would you kill yourself?”

“Yeah, bathtub, maybe jump off a building, but hopefully I won’t just end up being a living paraplegic.”

“I’m touching myself. Tell me more.”

I glanced around my room, as if someone could be watching what I was typing. “Or I’d like turn my car on in my garage, and I’d attach a hose to my exhaust and put the other end in my car. I’d write a letter to the Government as I’d slowly die, all alone in my self pity.”

“Snapchat me a picture of your dick.”

I downloaded Snapchat, signed up for an account, quickly figured out how it worked. I sent her a photo of my dick.

She replied with a photo of her vagina. She wasn’t doing anything with it. It was just a picture of her closed, hairy vagina. I’m not a big fan of vagina photos, but I thought I’d be polite and replied with: “nice.”

“I don’t want to wake up tomorrow. LOL.”

We continued texting like that for the next couple of weeks: we’d talk about different ways we’d kill ourselves, we’d talk dirty, we’d Snapchat each other photos of our genitals, she’d end the night with a sweet, “Good night, Dean, I love chatting to you:)” message or something horribly depressing, like “One day I’m actually going to off myself, just need the courage and not feel so ungrateful LOL.” I’d see her in the gym, and she’d look completely happy and never mention any of our texts. I constantly asked her to come out to see me, but she seemed content with what we were doing. She had a boyfriend, and they seemed pretty happy with each other.

Besides that I had no real interest in meeting anyone else but forced myself to do it anyway. One evening, I looked at Mandy’s Facebook account on my way to a party: she’d posted all these photos of her with someone new. He was an older looking guy; he looked better than I did and they looked happy. I’d never seen her smile like that. She looked beautiful. I flicked through her entire new album of photos before blocking her and turning my phone off. I headed to the party. I drank with the people there and smiled with them as they took photos. I drove home and fell in and out of sleep as I watched a movie a friend leant me some time ago.

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