An Open Letter To Burnie Burns. Or the one where Ray is Happy to be alive.
~TW Suicide~
I’m sure this must be an odd gift for you to have slipped into your bag at RTX, most people preferring to see the look on your face while they tell you a story or give you something. I apologize if I just can't bring myself to look at you and follow along with that formula but I have a story for you Mr. Burnie Burns. Lets call it ‘How Burnie Burns Saved my Life and Why I’m Really Fucking Happy about that’.
Let’s go back to 2009 with a down on his luck 19 year old in New York with a cat and a shitty-ass apartment that I couldn't pay for with the money I got bussing tables in my dad’s bar. Sounds like the beginning of some cheesy sitcom doesn't it, like friends or some shit. But ya, there I was just barely out of highschool with no intentions of going to college and no ‘real world’ marketable skills to speak of. I mean I had an obnoxiously high gamerscore but that wasn't something that could get me a job. So I had a shitty ass apartment, a mattress, an XBox and my dad’s old TV, that was what all of my worldly possessions added up to besides some clothes and games.
Pretty soon a letter came from my complex, I had a month to pay off my back rent before I would be kicked out, so ya life was really awful. I was already working an exorbitant amount of hours every week and my dad had problems of his own, I was an adult now with my own problems that my parents couldn't help. I wasn't eating, I wasn't sleeping, I hadn't talked to anyone outside of XBox live in months, heck even my console was now collecting dust since I couldn't find the energy to play it. Back then I would find myself just laying in bed staring up at the ceiling for hours, mind and body numb to the world.
I didn't know back then what depression was, why getting out of bed in the morning was nearly impossible and why even when I did I couldn't find a reason to. My dad noticed how my already skinny frame was wasting away, and how my eyes had become devoid of life. He thought that if I moved back in with him then I would get better, that I would start playing games again, or at least start talking. And it did work for a time, both my little cousin and I lived in his apartment since my Aunt had a traveling job and for a moment I thought I was happy.
I had started eating again, I could sleep now, but that could only last for so long. Pretty soon I became even more withdrawn, no longer being able to get myself out of bed in the mornings even to go to work so my dad thought it was best to just leave me there with my thoughts. Those were not real thoughts that were going through my head though, it was all just darkness. I became knee deep in this sludge within myself, I could feel it pumping through my veins and turning my extremities to ice. I had been living a life with no purpose for years. I began to question myself. Was There really anything in my life worth living for?
That’s when I got up, my dad called it a miracle and cried on my shoulder, my cousin gave me a drawing she had made of me in school that day of me smiling again. It was now 2010, I was 20 and hadn't smiled in over a year. The months had passed during my slumber but I couldn't find it in myself to particularly care. I left the apartment for the first time in months that day, my body forcing me to go through the notions of walking to CVS and purchasing the largest bottle of sleep aid they had. The sludge was everywhere now, I was in a rut with no way to get out. So somewhere in my dumb fucking brain filled with dumb fucking black ooze I had decided that I would take an entire bottle of these sleeping pills so that I could just go to sleep, and never wake up. I was going to kill myself.
I got home and immediately made a beeline for the bathroom, looking at myself in the toothpaste-splattered mirror and readying myself for what I was about to do. It was a noise from the living room that stopped me for a moment, my little cousin. My little innocent cousin was watching powerpuff girls like little cousin’s do. I didn't want her to see a dead body, I didn't want to ruin her life by having her find me.
I could remember that our neighbor took her to dance lessons every day, a carpool at 5 O’Clock. I would just have to wait until then to do it. It hurt to have to wait, I wanted nothing more than to just go to bed and never wake up but something in the back of my mind screamed at me to wait. Weather it was my survival instinct or my love for my cousin I don't know but it drove me to get on my family computer and wait out the hour and a half that I had until she left.
Somehow by the grace of some power that I don't have I ended up on a peculiar website. Roosterteeth.com. I began to watch that website’s trademark series Red vs. Blue and on Season 2 episode 4 1:23 seconds into the video I laughed. I laughed for the first time in over a year. It wasn't a side splitting laugh, it wasn't something that bubbled up and I let released from years of being pent up inside me. I only really exhaled out of my nose a little bit harder and faster but I felt it. If I had looked down at the clock I would have seen that it was 8:30, and my cousin was home again.
Everything I have in my life now is thanks to you. I have great friends,an amazing job and a not-so shitty apartment that I can pay for. Everything is all thanks to you Burnie Burns, Geoff Ramsey, Gus Sorola, and Matt Hullum. I kept the bottle of pills. They sat on my desk, at first as an option but later becoming inspiration. I think now that its 2014, and the last time I laughed was probably ten minutes ago I’m done with it.
It must seem like an odd thank-you present. The bottle of pills I intended on swallowing and killing myself with. But I just wanted to let you know that thanks to a little animation project you started in a bedroom impacted my life more than anything else ever could in my life. I’m finally closing that chapter of my life, my struggle with depression recently ending after 2 years of therapy and medication. This is closure to me and a reminder to you.
You sure do a lot of good for what assholes you are.
~
Burnie whipped a tear from the corner f his eye when he was done reading and began to speak into the camera. He had put the bottle of pills on the shelf behind him and now was giving some speech about how the paper had moved him. The sender of the letter just left the podcast sound booth,his affiliation with that bottle and grinned to himself.
“Hey asshole where have you been!” Geoff yelled once he walked into the office. “New Call of Duty DLC, you have easter eggs to record.”
