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Movies these days always show how little someone's death really means to a person. Now, I don't mean one of those soap dramas or one of those chick-flick movies where the girl has to get over her dead husband or dead boyfriend or whatever - isn't there one about that involving shoes, or something? - but I mean action. You sit down and watch one of those gangster movies and they just callously fire into a crowd of people to get their point across, and not once do any of them really sit and think "am I doing something right, here?" You sit back and watch as they just pour bullets into a public space and get your little kicks out of seeing the blood fly and the bodies fall because the Romans had it right when it really comes down to it. Hell, even watch one of those superhero movies and count how many "bad guys" are thrown out windows, shot down without much thought, or left in situations that any watcher with a rational mind would be able to stop and realize they wouldn't get out of that alive.

I mean, what superhero goes off and kills more people than the villain they're trying to stop? Even if they're supposedly evil or bad or from the opposite team.

And I don't just mean the goons that are blown through like shots at a frat party, I mean named characters too. People we've been watching and following and rooting for the entire movie that are just tossed aside like a used rag for the sake of the plot and then forgotten. Sure, the characters might get a short scene where they're kneeling and crying and grieving over their friend, loved one, what have you, but what weight does it carry after that? Half the time they die, the plot goes on, and then there are explosions and pretty CGI that make us forget all about them until the next time we watch the movie and we go "oh yeah, them."

Because death doesn't really mean much in movies anymore. It's sorta treated like this obvious fact of life that just happens (and it does), but then swept under the rug like it's just not important. Like the lives of everyone's become so interchangeable and meaningless that one death doesn't warrant sorrow anymore and we just shrug it off as a mild inconvenience and move on about our lives like nothing really changed. Life goes on, I suppose, with or without you.

In movies, of course.

But that thought really stuck in my head when I was a kid. You know, back when I used to sneak into the living room and watch those rated R movies from the kitchen when my parents thought I was in bed. (And don't act like you didn't do it, too, or else I doubt the validity of your childhood.) It was a bit of a wakeup call, really, going from those hyper-censored PBS shows where everyone got along and shared willingly - or got mocked into sharing willingly by everyone around them - to a world of shootouts and hyper violence and human-looking robots getting their faces melted off.

The sex stuff I got, I wasn't really phased by that. And it's not like that soft-core style barely porn stuff in feature films really gives enough for the imagination these days.

I didn't know what to make of the violence, though. It just seemed so senseless, so wanton, so cruel, and yet people ate it up and begged for more until we had moves that, literally, were plot holes written to string together elaborate Rube Goldberg-style slaughter scenes. It addled my prepubescent mind after being pelted stories of compassion and acceptance and getting preached at to always be nice to people, even if they were jerks (douche nozzles). And I'll be honest here: it still confuses me to a degree, even after going through puberty and having my fair share of wanting to punch people in the face. I mean, I did live through public middle school, after all.

It always stuck with me, though, that initial, (for lack of a better word) violent shock when I saw a character get shot in the face for absolutely no reason, and the only mention of him for the next half-hour involving nothing more than what an inconvenience the blood and the body was to the protagonists as they bickered back and forth while scrubbing blood, brain, and bone out from their car's upholstery. I just didn't get it; it seemed so absurd. Who could kill a man - on accident, no less! - and be more concerned with how it made their day harder than the fact a life - that thing we 90's kids were told was so precious! - was wasted over absolutely nothing. It fucked me up before I was even old enough to know what an erection was, and, let me tell you, landed me in more councilor's offices than I care to remember because I just couldn't understand the why or the how of it.

I thought life meant something. I thought it was to be cherished and toted as something wholly special and treated with respect. I mean, it's just common respect, right? I know all the posters teachers put up said that it had to be earned, but everyone deserved this baseline level for just simply being a person, no matter gender, race, species or creed. But, maybe that's my hyper-liberal upbringing talking, or my illegitimacy getting the better of me. After all, when you're some teen girl's accidental pregnancy, you don't have much room to judge a person based off their nationality or genus.

Probably both. PBS does that to you.

So, back to TV: I was appalled. Never before had I seen such a disregard for life at such a fundamentally opposing view of what I was brought up on before. Like I said before: used rags. A character's hopes, dreams, desires, love, loss, family, friends, and responsibilities were just tossed aside as if they meant nothing! Nobody cared if they were a loved son or a caring mother, maybe the one friend to somebody in dire need of somebody close who was teetering on the edge. Nobody cared about the injustice of it all, how shooting that one guy behind the store counter because it was a mild inconvenience (and looked cooler than politely asking them to step aside or explain the situation (what are we, British?)) might utterly ruin dozens of lives because that one, nameless character was offed for the shits and giggles of the watchers.

In movies, of course.

And then I got to public high school, and I realized it wasn't just in movies.

If you were the wrong species, the wrong gender, didn't act enough like your species or like your gender, if you had different interests or wore the wrong clothes, or just happened to be a girl who liked girls, then you could be arbitrarily hated without rhyme or reason. That inbred respect for people I'd had since before I could remember? I felt like a minority. Compassionate and accepting in a sea of hormone-driven selfishness and egocentricity. Your life was shit? Well, how did that affect them? You needed help? Well, they had their own problems, so why should they help you? You did well on something? Good for you, who really cares?

I had no way of really dealing with it. I could fall back on my PBS-centric upbringing and try to "talk it out," maybe even tell the teacher so we could have some sort of mediation to stop the bully from being so mean and understand how much he was hurting my feelings. Hell, maybe we could just hug and shake hands and learn how to share and everything would be okay!

But any of you who've been through high school - public or otherwise - know how well that works. I guess it did work, to an extent. I got them to stop calling names by asking them to stop, and I got the cruel pranks to end after bringing it to the teacher's attention, but there was no PBS scripting for how to deal with getting shoved into a bathroom stall in the middle of lunch and called a "faggot" and a "pussy" and a "snitch" while getting your stomach kicked in until you could taste your recently eaten food mixed with blood and bile. There was network television scripting for that, though.

That was the first time in my life that I felt like some nameless side character, going through life and making friends just so I could get that counter job in my mid-thirties so the real protagonist (or antagonist) in this story would have somebody to shoot in the face. Because, let's be honest here: everyone thinks they're the main character of whatever story they're in. It just took a trip or two to the nurse and a few bloody noses before I realized how utterly unimportant I was, just like those goons in the movies.

There was no understanding it. How do you understand the shattering of your very foundation and belief in the basic goodness of human beings when all you see's this intolerance and hate with no real, solid foundation behind it? I couldn't understand it, but I could push through it and set it on the backburner. When you're really academically minded, it's easy to ignore everything and pour yourself into your work and study. If you're busy memorizing facts and dates and formulas, you don't really have much time to sit back and question reality and the state of human nature, now do you?

So I pushed on and made those good grades every parent wants to see, all the while holding myself up in my room to read as much classic literature as I could to impress those college professors and write that amazing essay to get me into one of those Ivy leagues. Spoilers: I didn't, but in retrospect I'm glad that I didn't. I wasn't the smartest or even (surprisingly) the most studious at my high school, but I made it into the top ten percent of my class and graduated with honors good enough to get me a scholarship to this state school some fifty miles away from home. It was far enough that I could fall back on my parents if I needed them, but could stretch my legs and run around yapping my head off all I liked without feeling confined by my parents. Both good things.

I started becoming reclusive and bitter towards the end of high school, but it was a lot more genuine in those days, and earned me the kind of outcast status I really deserved for it. As soon as I moved into a dorm - single one, too, since my scholarship was enough to cover for that - though, I apparently managed to turn my bitter, spiteful anger into the biggest chick magnet I'd ever seen. (And yes, I'm straight; I don't know why they started calling me "faggot" either.) In hindsight, I'm reminded of something a wise rabbit once said (and I'll paraphrase him here): I've noticed that every douchebag I know has a significant other, yet only most of the genuinely good people I know have somebody in their life. And even fewer truly great people.

I was one of those douchebags. And I reveled in it at the time. I'd kept all my old study habits from high school and was pretty good at internally motivating myself to keep it up, so my grades were always some of the highest in class. It only took me a few weeks into the first semester of Freshman year to realize I could get laid by setting up study groups filled with women struggling to keep their grades up (I still thank Frankie for the suggestion, clever cat). I was going to study anyways, and why do it alone? So I started paying close attention to girls' faces when tests were getting handed back, and would approach them after class and invite them back to my dorm room for some "private study sessions."

I got myself quite a few girlfriends from that. And the beauty of the whole system? I'd help them study, get in their jeans, take them on pity dates (or they'd take me on pity dates, I could never figure out who was more pitiful, me or them), and when I was bored of them after a month or two, I'd dump them and find some other poor girl struggling to stay afloat in her college courses.

It wasn't very PBS of me, but where had that gotten me before? Bloody and beaten and berated until I was left crying on the bathroom floor? By the time college rolled around, I was tired of being PBS, tired of trying to be PBS, and gave in to the commercial television. It wasn't just in the movies anymore.

So, what the hell? Why treat people as equals and with any modicum of respect if I wasn't going to receive the same kindness? If we were all as disposable and unimportant as everyone on the glowing box, then what was the point in bothering?

Around my twenty-first birthday, things started slowing down for me. Either the girls had started brightening up at my college or I'd run through all the White Dwarfs (really hot; not very bright), but it got harder and harder and harder to find my next tutoring victim to use and throw away when I was done with her. But that was alright. I mean, my longest dry spell was the month before I turned twenty-one, and after that there was suddenly the bar scene. I kept to my old tactic whenever I saw somebody that looked like they'd be an easy pick-up, but if there weren't any easy marks then all I had to do was walk three blocks down from the campus and spend maybe ten bucks on bitch beers to get myself a broad for the night.

That was the first time I'd ever had somebody comment on how clean my dorm room was, that first night I picked a girl up from the bar. I'd always been fairly meticulous with my room back in grade school, so it never really pinged as anything important to me when I started cleaning more and more compulsively as the years went on. After all, the cleaning really picked up around the same time my study habits did, too, and so I always just went off the assumption that they went paw-in-paw: I was cleaning to distract myself, just like why I was studying.

It made sense at the time. I got myself into this rhythm after the first few months, and it made it so I didn't really have to think to start doing the repetitive task of dusting, sweeping, moping, folding laundry, straightening bookshelves, and so on. Believe it or not, it actually started to get rather soothing after a while. I never could figure out why.

Not until that first half-drunk bitch (I know she was a canine. Not the prettiest one in the world, but I usually stick with my own genus, if not species) stumbled into my room and looked around with wide, brown eyes (I think they were brown, at least. Maybe she was a dhole?). I can't remember her face, or the sex, or whether she stayed for breakfast the next morning, but I do remember what she said with absolute clarity:

"Damn, boy! You keep your shit locked down! Are you sure we're in the right room? 'Cause this looks like some _chick's_place, with all her shit sorted and straight. It's like you don't want to look like you even live here!"

She didn't say anything else the rest of the night (but damn was she a screamer). I shrugged it off at the time, taking it as just a hit to my masculinity that I could prove to her within the next hour or so. I was a bit rougher than usual, and I still feel bad for that, but it's not like I left any lasting marks on her and she seemed to love it regardless, so I figured I'd proven myself to her (and me) and that was that.

But her words kept sitting in the back of my mind over the next few weeks. It didn't star to bother me until I found myself on my hands and knees scrubbing the tiles of my bathroom floor for the second time in as many days. I remember standing up quickly (smacked the base of my tail on the doorknob, too) and looking myself in the mirror, putting my paws down on the countertop to really lean in and look myself in the eye. The whole room - the whole dorm - smelled like lemon disinfectant with a few hints of bleach coming from my toilet and bath tub. My bed was made, pillows centered, desk clear and spotless, and my bookshelf was meticulously alphabetized. Micro-alphabetized, even. I spent a good hour crawling around my dorm room floor looking for just one hair I'd left behind, shed at any point in the day - the week! - but I couldn't find anything.

That's when it hit me. The real reason. It wasn't just idly trying to keep myself from thinking too deeply or giving myself the free time to really look at my life and my decisions with a critical lens. Sure, I was doing it for those reasons too, but they were secondary to the real reason. I was purposefully, systematically removing all evidence of myself from my life, one hair at a time.

I moved away from home. Far enough away that I could slowly be forgotten by my friends and extended family.

I studied hard and kept my grades up. Up just enough to keep my scholarship and stay in college, but just low enough to stay off the Dean's List or any intellectual fraternities.

I socialized with my peers and classmates. But never more than just during class or during the occasional college event.

I even went out and dated. Date just shallowly and quickly enough that I don't form any serious emotional connections.

I was making it easy - really damn easy - to be forgotten and swept away like dust under a rug. So that when my meaningless existence got snuffed out by somebody who really mattered in this story called Life, it would be an easy cleanup. Best not to be a burden, right?

The realization gave me a kind of perverse sense of power over my life: if everything I did was pointless, and I'd be forgotten regardless, who the fuck cared what I did? I was reminded of a poem, and I still am, written by a man named William Cullen Bryant when this realization hit. I'll write it down here:

"So shalt thou rest; and what if thou withdraw

In silence from the living, and no friend

Take note of thy departure? All that breathe

Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh

When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care

Plod on, and each one as before will chase

His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave

Their mirth and their employments, and shall come

And make their bed with thee. "

I wanted to get that excerpt tatted to my back I felt it applied to me so well. Everything I did would be forgotten; everything everyone else did would be forgotten as well. Life would continue.

I wasn't much of a religious person growing up, being brought up by hippy-dippy, leftist liberal atheists, but right about then was when it felt like I lost God. I never prayed, never went to church, never got baptized or went to communion, and even the funerals I'd been to hadn't been done in a religious fashion, but the idea that there was always the possibility of a god was always present in the back of my mind. It was like a little fall back for when things got awful, like when tornadoes rip through your town or when a family member's dying in a hospital; a little bit of comfort to reach into and say "there is some purpose somewhere, and this is happening for a reason." Even in my hardest times, I could find that little ray of sunshine and push my mood back up, even if just a little bit.

That was gone. I was left with this vacuous emptiness where my fallback meaning used to be, and nothing was rushing to fill it. (After all, nature loves a vacuum. Just look at space.) And like I said, at first this was exhilarating. No more potential afterlife? No more eternal consequences? Life only mattered for as long as we were here? Why the hell not burn through it in the most pleasure-seeking way possible! I mean, really go out and make the whole thing wroth while!

And this lasted for weeks, this invincibility. I stopped going to class as often, because why did I need to know anything about quantum theory on the intro level? I stopped studying, too, because why was making that 'A' in Calculus so important, anyways? My weekends started on Thursday, until I was tired of waiting that long and I started them on Wednesday. I stopped stopping myself when I wanted Jello shots and stout beers on Sunday nights and stopped caring enough to drag myself through class with a hangover come Monday morning. The bitter mathematician in me - because I was going for a degree in physics and then a Masters in aerospace engineering - thought it'd be amusing to graph the descent of my grades as the weeks pushed on: first gradual, and then it was as if my grades took a swan dive off a cliff.

But that was all okay, because I was getting drunk when I wasn't getting laid, and getting laid when I wasn't black-out drunk. My room was still as spotless as ever, albeit with a few extra vomit stains on the carpet outside the bathroom and an increased need to scrub the toilet and shower. I used to head off to the gym every other day or so, and would try to keep my diet balanced _enough_so that I didn't gain too much weight (girls, after all, went for the thinner ones when looking for nothing but a quick lay, in my experience), but I let that go completely.

By the end of a month, I was about thirty pounds heavier, three letter grades lower, and was only getting a third of the girls I used to.

Up to that point, I hadn't needed a job: my parents were just funneling me "fun money" since my scholarship paid for pretty much everything school related. As soon as my grades plummeted, all of that changed. I was informed that I wouldn't be able to bring my GPA back up enough to keep the scholarship for the following semester, and my parents outright said they wouldn't fund my entertainment if I didn't have my shit together enough to get what needed to be done, done. I'm sure that if I really talked with them, actually told them what was going on with me - that the only thing keeping me going was my hedonistic pursuits - they might have caved and started funding me again, but I couldn't. How could you possibly tell somebody, make somebody understand what you're going through when you don't even get it yourself?

I knew I wasn't alone - I wasn't one of those annoying assholes that thinks he's so special that nobody could possibly get him - but truth be told, I didn't know who I shared my torment with because I wasn't sure what tormented me. All I knew was my confusion, and my pain, and my desire to drown that in bursts of ephemeral pleasures so I didn't have to think about it.

So, my spending money dried up, and I was quickly about to lose my dorm. I couldn't hit the bars anymore since I couldn't afford to buy my own drinks, let alone a girl's, which meant I could neither get laid nor get drunk. My food plan, which I'd set up to accommodate how I used to eat, was about to be maxed out, and without the extra money to pay for food things were starting to look all the more grim. I could have told my parents that I needed cash to get food to live, but I just knew they'd make me promise to not spend it on beer or drugs, and I would break that promise in a heartbeat. I might have given up on a lot of my PBS upbringing, but honesty was one of the few things I never let go. So, I couldn't go to them for food.

I was sober and blue-balled for about a month when the final push came. The semester was almost over - about a week left - and it had already reached the point where even an A on my finals couldn't bring me up to passing, so I stopped even bothering to go to class. I was laying naked on my dormroom floor when my first final was about to start. There was an empty pizza box lying next to me that had been there the past week. I had my phone - one of the few things my parents were still willing to pay for, if nothing else because it let them talk to me - in my paws as I stared up at its empty screen. It'd been a week since my parents last called, and a month since the last friend. I hadn't gotten a text in two weeks. My school email was filled with notices that my financial aid was no longer going to be coming in and my personal email was completely void. No emails from friends, no notifications from any of my social media outlets telling me somebody had messaged me, not even something from YouTube to tell me somebody I subscribed to had a new video.

It was there, lying naked on the floor, that I realized I could disappear and nobody would notice. I'd spent my whole life preparing for that moment, anyways. Clean dorm, no friends to council, my parents had a younger daughter and an older sun to occupy themselves with (both of which weren't as much failures as I was, and were children they could be proud of, unlike me), and whoever was handling the emails being sent to me would have one less idiot to worry about. It all just seemed to click into place: this is when I needed to die. And, for whatever reason, that made me laugh. I couldn't remember the last time I had laughed, to be honest, but for whatever reason, the realization that now was the time I just needed to throw myself off a building mad me laugh so hard I was rolling on the floor and clutching my sides. My face still hurt as I got dressed - nothing too fancy, just torn jeans and a plain white T-shirt; no reason to ruin good clothes that might get passed on to somebody else, after all - and locked up my dorm room behind me for, what I figured, would be the last time.

I thought about leaving a note about half-way up the long staircase leading to the roof of the five-story dormitory. I actually thought about it long enough to pause for a moment before I realized notes were left for people who would care enough to read them. So I trudged on, panting heavily by the time I pushed myself through the doorway that opened up to the hot, humid mid-May air.

I don't remember walking to the edge, but I remember laughing as I stood there, my paws balanced on the lip of the roof as I stared down into the street below me. I thought that a crowd might amass like in all the movies with scenes like this, or that at least someone might notice me and try to talk me down. And, you know, I kinda wanted those dramatics. If I was going to go out, at least go out with some histrionic style, right? So I stood there for what felt like hours waiting to see if anybody would bother looking up. My legs started to burn and my knees threatening to buckle before I realized I wasn't going to get some spectacle. At least two class periods passed as I stood there, and not once did anybody bother to look up at the desperate wolf that was, quite literally, on the edge.

I was under the impression, at the time, that nothing could make me feel lower than what had driven me to step up onto the edge in the first place, but the realization that nobody cared enough to even spend a few seconds to glance up at me lead me to realize a whole new low I'd never thought possible.

I backed away from the ledge, no longer wanting to jump. After all, jumping's rather public. Whether they cared or not, somebody would have found my body, and the sheer amount of cleanup that would be required to mop my sorry hide off the sidewalk, I reasoned, was much messier than I'd traditionally gone for. I had turned on my heels and started walking back towards the stairs when I saw a piece of paper pinned under a rock just a few feet away from me. Curiosity got the better of me - and why rush off to go kill yourself when you have the rest of your life for that? - and I figured "what the hell?" I walked over to the paper and picked it up.

To Whom This May Concern,

_ There are only two reasons I can think of for why you'd find this note. Either 1) you're on a date with somebody who really, really likes heights and probably sunrises/sunsets, or 2) you're thinking of jumping off. Now, I may not be an expert at this sort of thing, but I figure that the latter's more likely, but if you are on a date, then congrats! You can put this note back down and go back to what you were doing. Put the note back down, Date Person? Good._

So, Jumper: you're thinking of ending your life. Not so good. I don't know who you are, and I don't know your reasons, but I do know that your life is worth a lot more to somebody than you think it is. Nobody is unloved, and nobody is alone in this world of over seven billion people, and if you're thinking about killing yourself because you're lonely, or because your miserable, or because you went through a bad breakup, just remember that, statistically speaking, somebody has to be out there that can make a difference in your life. And, statistically speaking, you've made a difference in someone else's life, too. Or will. But not if you jump off today.

No matter how it feels right now, you do matter to somebody, somewhere. And if it really, really doesn't feel that way right now, and all you need is a little bit of love to keep yourself from ending a life as precious as yours, then I love you. That's right, you heard me: I love you. I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I am, but I love you. Not because you're perfect, not because you're drop-dead gorgeous, not because you're the most brilliant person I've never met, but because you're somebody hurting that needs somebody to say it to them, and if all it takes to keep you from jumping is to know that you're loved, then I love you. Simple as that.

If that's not enough to stop you, then I understand. Just know that I'd be hurt knowing somebody took their life when there's so much to live for, and so much that you can be, accomplish, and have if you can just push past this one rough spot. It gets better. I promise.

Love,

_ Anonymous_

I had to have read that note at least five times as I just stood there dumbly up on the roof. The trip back down the stairs took a lot longer than the trip up, and there was about five minutes of panic outside my dorm as I scrambled to find where I'd left my keys (I was worried I left them in the dorm, itself; thankfully they were in my back pocket). I read it about twenty more times once I was inside and stripped down to my boxers - like I said, it was hot and humid outside. I set it down on my desk while I went and took a shower to cool myself off, and when I came back I was almost convinced it wouldn't be there. That it was just some dream I'd dreamt out of heat stroke or starving nausea.

That note saved me, as cheesy as that sounds. Not because some stranger loves me or because of some bad math basically saying "There are plenty of fish in the sea," but because I had given up on the idea that anything gets better. For years I had been convincing myself I was worthless, that things were bad and would continue to be bad and, maybe, would get even worse as things went on. Never had the thought "It gets better" even crossed my mind in all my years of torment. And I'll admit, when I first read that I scoffed - scoffed hard - at the idea. How could it possibly get better? Life sucks and we die - where in there does "it gets better" fit into that? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe it wasn't the note that was flawed, but it was me.

I had a family that still loved me, despite being a mite disappointed in me right now because I was being an idiot.

I had friends who had expressed concern when they saw me going downhill, and only turned their backs to me after I'd pushed them away.

I had dated more women than I ever thought would look my way.

I had sex!

And, I mean, I had a pretty good brain on me. After all, not everyone can get a full-ride scholarship to a decent university, and usually people have to work to make it into the Dean's List and Phi Theta Kappa, not actively work to keep _out_of them.

So, no, it wasn't the proclamation that some person I'll never meet loves me that made me walk back down to my dorm and sit down to write this out, it was the realization that things aren't as bad as they seem. And, let's be honest here: never have been for me.

I've not gotten my shit figured out yet, and I'm still recovering from all the damage I'd caused to myself in my year of self-destruction. I'm still overweight, though not as bad as I once was; I'm still working to regain my scholarship through grades I'm actually putting effort into; I'm now having to work two part-time jobs to afford the little economy apartment I moved into with my parents' aid; I had to take student loans to continue my education, since my job wasn't enough to pay for the complete tuition, but I'm still in school and still going strong; I'm still patching up the friendships I had all but ruined; I'm still working to kick the alcoholism I developed, but that's a lot easier with people aware of my strife and supporting me with every step of the way; and I'm still trying to re-learn how to talk to women after years of treating them like nothing but objects of sexual gratification.

So, To Whom This May Concern,

It will get better, for you and for me. I'm still working on fixing everything going on in my life, and I still struggle to stay motivated some mornings when I wake up and ask myself "what's the point?" But it will get better. And while I'm not such the person to say "I love you" to a complete stranger, know that somebody does, and others will.

So, if you find this ten-page note laying around on the roof of Dormitory C, then there are only three reasons I can fathom you'd be up here. 1), you're on a date, to which I say you've got really shitty taste in where to take your date; 2) you're a roofer; or 3) you're thinking about jumping. If you're either of the first two, congratulations! You read through my life story without needing to. Give yourself a pat on the back and put this back where you found it for the person who'll really need to read this. You've done that? Good. Thank you.

To the Person Number 3: a note like this is what saved my life. Maybe this won't mean as much to you as that note I found, but in the off chance this is what you needed to make a difference, I hope to whatever god/gods you may pray to you never forget these three words:

It Gets Better.

Sincerely,

A Chubby, Socially Awkward, Reborn PBS Watching Wolf