Eve White: Literary Agent

from A VOICE IN THE DISTANCE

'It's just this pain, this unbearable mental pain – often it's your body too, and every part of you hurts. But you don't really care about your body, it's your mind. Every thought hurts like hell. Everything you see is awful, twisted, pointless. And the worst – the worst of it is yourself. You realize you are the most ghastly person in the world, the most hideous, inside and out. And you just want to escape, you just want to get rid of yourself, of your suffering, of the pain inside your head. You want to shut out the world and yourself, for ever. A–and death is the only option left because you've been through this time and time again, thought and thought about trying to change yourself, the way you think, the way you behave, the way you live. Yet it always comes back to this – the fact that you just d–don't want to be alive – ' He breaks off, turning away suddenly, pressing his fingers to his eyes. I stare at the back of his head. My eyes sting, my throat aches. I want to hear this, I want to understand, but at the same time it hurts, on so many different levels. It hurts to hear that he can reach a place where he doesn't care about me any more, doesn't care about damaging me so much I might never recover. It also hurts to hear him say it, to hear him verbalize even in the most simplistic terms the agony he was going through, has been through time and time again, while I remained blissfully unaware.