The Suicide Diary by Kirsten Rees Page B

here and no one from before knew where I was. There were three other girls in the same shared living space with me, but they thankfully seemed to have their own lives and not the type to want to bond over midnight coffee.  As much as I was looking forward to a fresh start, the idea of becoming friends with people in such close living quarters was unnerving – I was hoping to avoid awkward conversations in the kitchen or have my flatmates inviting themselves into my room to exchange life stories.
    My college acceptance letter lay on the newly made up, single, bed along with my bag, notebooks and various bits of stationary. I was going to try to turn things around and stop this cycle of bad decisions and screw ups.
    On the morning of my first day, I took a deep breath and pushed open the door, walking into the large, bright room and quickly found an empty seat. There was a small group of noisy people all chatting over each other enthusiastically. These were to be my classmates for the next year - people who might have been friends, study-mates, drinking buddies - and I couldn't make eye contact with a single person. I pulled a seat back quietly and sank into it as inconspicuously as I could.
    I sat in the front row since that didn’t allow for any accidental catching of eyes with the people sat behind me, and denied anyone the opportunity to strike up a quiet conversation since the lecturer was stood only a foot in front of me. As much as I wanted to be invisible, I couldn't help overhearing some of the conversations behind me. They were soon hushed in to silence as the lecturer stepped to the front centre of the room.
    She stood in front of the class with perfect posture and had an air of complete self-confidence. "Okay class, welcome to ‘Registration Day’. My name is Professor Fulham and I will take your first class every Monday and Thursday morning. I'm glad to see nearly everyone has made it out of bed for the first day” Her eyes fell to a clipboard on the desk by her side. “only three missing it would appear. Statistically five percent will transfer out of my class by the end of the week, thirty percent of you will drop out by mid-term and another ten percent will fail the year end exams. As for the ones who make it into second year with me well then the hard work really begins." she said.
    A few people sucked in their breath audibly and I quietly wondered which of us would survive until the end of the year. My motivation was not having to move back home with my overly intrusive brother Matthew and avoiding disappointing my mother. Joshua is always a delight to be around but afterwards I can't help but feel worse than before, since his positive outlook contrasts so heavily with my negativity.
    Over the next month I did what I could to maintain a good impression on my new lecturers without becoming a teacher’s pet. I spent a reasonable amount of time in the library, didn't hand my essays in too early and was careful to find a balance between being too quiet and too involved in class debates.
    Thankfully I was right about my flat mates - one was a third year medical student who barely came out of her room, one spent more time at her boyfriend’s than she did at ours and the third dropped out after a six weeks and was never replaced, so little effort was required on my part to be sociable. Since my cooking skills turned out to be the most advanced I offered to make our dinners most nights which gained a little appreciation. We sat for our meal, made polite conversation for almost an hour and then went our separate ways.
    Most of my time was spent either studying in my room or sat by the window indulging in one of the many fictional books I borrowed from the library. Even as a child I loved to read stories, but the older I got, the more I enjoyed hiding from reality and letting the characters take my imagination into their world. Sometimes, I wished I could fall down a rabbit hole or skip along the yellow brick