For days vicious memories swallowed up my thoughts. I thought back to the days when I could help Kelli, or at least I thought I could. I remembered the first time I found about her self harm and suicidal inclinations. It was a week after my 13th birthday. I was lying in bed, Evanescence at full blast in my ears to occupy my mind as I drifted off to sleep. I felt my phone vibrate under my pillow, the backlight still managing to flood the shadowy room. I opened the text and read it. At first I thought I was dreaming. ‘Mel, help me. Say something to me. I want to kill myself. I’m sitting here with pills and blades, if you don’t say something soon I'm going to do it. I can’t take it anymore. Please just say something. Kelli x’ I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I knew Kelli wasn’t happy, but I never thought she would go as far as suicide. My hands shook. My head emptied, what was I meant to say? I quickly did the only thing I knew how to, I begged her. I cried and begged her not to do it. I told her I loved her, told her I didn’t know what I would do without her. I felt so insignificant, lost. I sent the text, still crying. I wanted to talk to someone, I needed help, I couldn’t cope with this kind of thing, I was weak, helpless and I knew it. I texted Matt. He was one of my very best friends, four years older than me, and the loveliest person I knew. It was my first instinct to ask him what to do. He was suicidal once, something I had never talked about with him, but he had been bullied for years, and he was all ready to give everything up when he became a Christian, and this was something I wholly admired and respected him for. I asked him what to do, said that my friend was about to attempt suicide and that I needed help, desperately. The rest of the night was a blur. Every text from Kelli made me feel worse, made me realise that I could help even less. Every text from Matt making me feel infinitely better. I knew that without him I would have been nothing, Kelli would have died a long time ago. At about three o’clock I had begun to panic, Kelli hadn’t replied to my last message, not for over half an hour. I could only fear the very worse. I called her and called her, never did she pick up the phone. I ran to my sister’s room, somehow I felt I could tell her. I tried to explain, but she couldn’t understand me through my sobs. Matt told me that I if I really thought she had finally caved in that I should get an adult involved, but advised me that she had probably gone to sleep and that I should too. So I did; crying, shaking, screaming in my head, I slept. Little did I know that this, the most desperate and horrifying night I had ever experienced, was only the very beginning of the hardest, cruellest, most depressing year of my life.