An Introduction
This is the introduction to a story - I am looking for criticism. Be as harsh as you want (fear not, it's hard to hurt my feelings or discourage me). I am from Australia so some of the words I use are spelled differently.
The title is "I Am Going to Kill Myself" (see blog for more info).
I Am Going to Kill Myself.
I am going to kill myself, Denver declared one very early, frosty morning. He exhaled and let himself relax in his bed, having been very quickly convinced that, without significant intervention, his time here was now limited to approximately 229 days, give or take a few hours. He had lost track of time in the amount of it he had spent in the pitch black, trying to fall asleep, but now he felt that, in making this decision, he had achieved something for the night, and that his insomnia would soon be satisfied with it.
Denver did not feel as though he had any reason to kill himself. At this moment he was smiling at his blackened ceiling with a proud sense of arrogance, silently acknowledging that his problem was not having any reason to remain alive. He had been alive for so long, and in his juvenile mind he felt that he should have had something to show for it.
In his juvenile mind, he could find nothing to show for it.
It was making him sick and that was something he could feel. It was the suppressed desire to do something with the sheltered, nurtured life he had been given. With each day that he did nothing he felt a familiar sense of anxiety culminating, a sinkhole crumbling at the centre of ... at the centre of something. What it was didn't matter, he was hardly adept at psychology; though he didn't understand what it was, it was getting bigger, very much like the unseen, unidentifiable danger recognised in some slight abnormality during a dream. It was unsettling.
In the past he had waited for something to change; secretly he had expected to be thrown into some exhilarating conflict, to save someone else's life in order to justify his own. Maybe his alter-ego would appear in the form of a hallucination and convince him to successfully breed an army and trigger a paradigm shift, internally and externally. Maybe he would be diagnosed with cancer, and those around him could sympathise with the desperate actions he then took. It was desperation that he needed.
The time Denver had allocated himself to remain alive had nothing to do with what he planned to do between now and then, as he had no plans at all. The 22nd of January, two days before he was certifiably another year older, something he was adamant about avoiding - this was when he was to die. As per cliché, it felt a long way away, and not far at all. The date was set and there was no pulling out. Naturally, one might have assumed this was all Denver's own attempt to save himself, a paradox, if he had made such a plan in an attempt to defy it at the last moment. To know that he might live was to let apathy reign again. He had to believe he was dying, or he would make no effort to save himself.
It is for that reason I must die, he reasoned.
Comments
Don Roble
kt6550
Also, I think you could make this just a bit longer to fully nail down Denver's thought processes.
Vermithrax
Is there something significant about his next birthday, that he would rather kill himself, than face becoming that one year older? Does that one extra year in someway trigger his drastic paradigm shift?
The concept is fair,.The imagery is fair. The narrative somewhat rambling and brief. It is hard to feel any sort of sympathy for Denver, when he obviously seems to feel nothing himself.
I would like to read a lot more of this, before I form any sort of valid opinion for this piece.
Veins
Don, sorry about the description, I actually meant that that this was something new by me, not something old by me.
Kt, thanks for pointing that out. I'm not sure if people are alerted to comments on this forum or not, but I'll ask if I could just improve that phrase by replacing the semi colon with a full stop (I have a habit of using semi colons more than I need to...)?
Vermithrax, I haven't completely decided of Denver's age yet. I was hoping to make him either 17 (turning 18) or 20 (turning 21) - one of those "coming of age" dates, anyway, and to expand on how he doesn't want to reach adulthood, because he sees it as mediocrity.
Your comments have been useful. The introduction needs some work and I'll re-write that before anything else for this story.
Don Roble
Don Roble