Death, like everything else in life, is hard to come by only if you want it.

If it is life you seek, it seems, you are rewarded with death. If you lust after death, you will find yourself immortal.

This is what I contemplate as I sit in a gloomy room of the Avery Psychiatric Hospital, sans shoelaces. Not that I would ever use such a dull item to escape from society. Shoelaces lack the grandiosity that my exit deserves. In fact, it was this very thinking that landed me on the Kunn Memorial Bridge at three o'clock that fateful morning, pants tucked into my socks and a pair of yellow fairy wings strapped to my back.

The Costume Depot offered me a wide array of mystical colors - baby's breath blue, little lady's lavender, playfully precious pink - but it was the piss yellow wings that captured my attention. For when I flew, I was taking the sunshine with me.

Or at least, I would have, had it not been for a certain nosey trucker who happened to pull over on the bridge, directly above my watery grave, to relieve his child-sized bladder. As he unzipped his filthy jeans, he was apparently mystified by the sight of a seventeen-year-old male in yellow fairy wings baring his soul to the mercy of the frigid, polluted liquid below. So mystified, it seems, that he felt the need to report a methamphetamine addict frightening citizens on the bridge, because I was so obviously there for the sole purpose of disrupting his early morning urine deposit.

The problem with people is that they always think that whatever is happening is happening to them. Ralph Flynn has now become a small celebrity in our town, savior of a depressed young boy, so that only I know him for the scared man he really is. Running in fear from a skinny teen who couldn't have cared less about the fat man peeing off the side of the bridge. He attends support groups at our community center for the relatives and friends of suicide survivors every Tuesday, receives letters in the mail every other day praising his courage and thanking him profusely for keeping our children safe. My own family bakes pastries for this stranger and invites him every weekend to Sunday night dinner, which he accepts. Leo tells me this lonely man sits in my chair, at my table, in my house, eating my dinner, while I rot away in this mental institution, because he couldn't have had the etiquette to keep his perpetually sniffly nose out of other people's business.

He's snatched my place in this family right out from under me.

And even I have to admit that everyone seems happier this way, with Ralph in my chair and me out of sight.