"Happy New Year, love." the elderly gentleman smiled at her as she left the shop. She didn;t hear him. She didn't hear anything. Clutching the small package in her hand, she felt a calm wash over her. This New Year was going to be great. The best ever. The last ever.
Allowing her thumb to feel the smoothe edges of the box, she ran over her plans in her head. Over the last few months, she had gone over and over how things would work in her mind. She had done her research. She knew exactly how many she would need, how long it would take, how it would feel. Oddly, she found she wasn't afraid. It was more exhilerating than scary. She could now, finally, see the light at the end of the tunnel. It was a refreshing, almost happy feeling. It would soon be over. All if the suffering, all of the pain.
The bus journey home was long, every second passed by like an hour. never before had she been so desperate to get home. It had been a long time, since her evening plans involved more than eating dinner in deafening silence with her parents and watching old Friend reruns in her room until she had cried herself to sleep.
Knowing that all those tiny little packets of painkillers were waiting for her under her matress was like torture. The end was so close, yet so far away. Feeling like the child she once was on Christmas Eve, she was impatiently excited.
She didn't see the oncoming bus until it slammed into the side of her bus. The last thought that raced through her mind, "I'm not ready to die."