I think my disgust for the human race started in the 5th grade. My best friend and I were not popular girls, but girls bullied by everyone. Eventually it took a toll on my fragile friend, combined with her parents divorce and already being rather sensitive, and she tried to take her own life. Her mother found her hanging and got her down in time to be taken to a hospital and saved. She came back to school months later, a lot quieter and sadder than before. She began to cut. And eventually, someway or another, the other kids noticed. Noticed the cuts, discovered she had tried to take her life. And they targeted her more and more for it, bullying and harassing her nonstop. Making her wish she hadn't survived even more, until eventually she tried to **** herself once again. But she was caught in the act this time, closely observed as she was, and taken out for many months once again. When she returned, she was a zombie. She stopped cleaning herself. Stopped trying to eat. She quit taking care of herself and that was another thing for the kids to pick on her about. I tried to keep her head above the water, but as the "suicidal freaks" best friend, I was being attacked too. Soon our fellow students were drowning us both in cruel words and brutal actions and snide rumors. I was sinking down with her, but my descent was silent. Self harm in secret places. Crying myself to sleep into my pillow so nobody could hear me. Writing suicide notes in my notebook to calm myself down and remind myself death could save me from all the torture at any time. I came to realize my classmates were not children, but monsters in human skin. They had tried to **** my friend, were still killing her. And now they were killing me. Ripping away my hope for the future and any love I held for the world, pulling away my idea that people were inherently good and replacing it with the concept that people were beasts who wanted to destroy me because they could. Because the one who made us so sad we killed ourselves would be the winner of the twisted game, because our deaths would be something to laugh at, just like her attempted suicide was. It's been six years now, and some part of me is still drowning in that ocean of sadness. I haven't heard from her since her last attempted suicide, a few years ago. Because she never got better either. She's still drowning too. And the monsters? I still walk among them every day. Their eyes slide past me like I'm not even there, like they don't even remember the child they ripped out of me. Like destroying a part of me was the simplest, most meaningless thing in the world.