Sirens wailed, cutting through the wind like distant screams, echoing off the rain-slicked concrete of the bridge. The storm roared overhead, and down below, voices—panicked, hushed, horrified—rose in fragments, carried by the gusts like whispers from another world. Blue and red lights pulsed across the wet asphalt, illuminating the pale, stunned faces of onlookers huddled behind yellow tape. Police barked commands to hold the line, their silhouettes rigid against the chaos.

On the highway beneath the bridge, paramedics worked with grim urgency. Kneeling in the downpour, their gloved hands moved with precision and haste. One of them, soaked to the bone, helped lift the limp figure onto a stretcher, his face unreadable save for the weight behind his eyes. The boy’s body was loaded into the ambulance with practiced care, the doors slammed shut, and the vehicle pulled away with a hollow screech of tires.

Inside the boy’s sodden jeans, a folded scrap of paper peeked out—barely visible, nearly lost. A paramedic retrieved it, pausing under the shelter of the ambulance’s open door. The rain tapped rhythmically on the metal roof as he unfolded the note. The words, scrawled in shaky graphite with the dull tip of a pencil, were smudged but legible.

He read it once. Then again.

The man’s face softened, eyes dark with sorrow. He glanced back at the stretcher—at the boy he could no longer help—before looking down once more at the final message, still trembling in his hand.

It read...

Dear Mom and Dad whoever is reading,

I’ve done it. Whether at the foot of a bridge or in a pool of blood on my bathroom floor — it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I gave myself the one thing I needed: release.

My life was hell. Some people might say starving kids in Africa have it worse — but they don't.
They suffer together.
I suffered alone.

Do you know how much worse that is?

They had each other. I had nothing. No one with this broken face. No one who cared.

Instead, I had a drunk and an adulterer — people I was as ashamed to call parents as they were to call me son.

I never heard my own name in that house. Forget an "I love you."
Some days they acted like I wasn't even real.

It gets to a point where seeing a family on the street hurts more than the cuts on your arms. You know you’ve lost when it feels like that.

I gave up on friendships when I realized I couldn’t even have one with the people who made me.
My “mother” couldn’t even pretend to care about the child that was literally inside her.

My childhood ended when I learned how to run — when I knew the only way to stay safe was to stay away.
My dad found every hiding place inside the bungalow. I just had to run further, faster, where the bottles and belts couldn’t find me.

School just doubled down on what I already knew.

When I played hooky, my “parents” never gave a shit but when the school threatened to get involved with fines, I was forced to go back.

They cared more about fines than their own flesh and blood.

If you feel sympathy reading this, save it.

This world forsook me the second I was born. God too.

There must be a god — because someone had to be pulling the strings to make sure every second of my life hurt.

Every torture has the one torturing.

My life had no value.