Free On The Bridge by Ada Uzoije

individuals. He’d rush his homework, finish his assignments with as little possible time being devoted to them, as long as they were acceptable for a pass rate. His parents got along a bit better now that Doug refrained from constantly mentioning the stupid man who killed himself on the bridge and they had a stronger income with the project Norman had been involved in. The house had become a bit lighter in atmosphere and things had returned to normal.
    When Thompson called to borrow his Call of Duty game, Douglas told him that he had lost it when he went to visit his grandparents. When Thompson had old Mick call Doug, he was “too busy studying for the exams” to get together. Days became weeks and his friends faded into the background of his busy online life. Just like with the nightmares, he didn’t tell anybody about his new occupation. His mother noticed that he was spending a lot of time on the computer and when she enquired what he was doing, she would get the typical teenage generic response, “Nothing, Mom!” Jean wondered if he was watching pornography, but didn’t like to pry, so she just left him to it, hoping whatever it was, he’d grow tired of it long enough to beat her at a chess game again. Whatever it was, she thought, it would be a passing phase.
    He found sites that explored the psychology of suicide, sites that gave data on its prevalence in different areas, demographics and age groups. He was amazed to find out on one of the research sites that suicide was the second most common cause of death among American teenagers, the first being vehicle accidents. He found several sites that tried to acquaint parents with the signs of impending suicide in their children and the behavioural deviations that accompanied the illness.
    One of the most interesting sites was one called Suicide Witness, a type of social media site where people who had seen suicide could share their feelings about the events and their takes on it, scrutinizing it from all angles they needed to make sense of it. He was surprised to discover that there were as many different experiences as there were people. Some people commented that it was actually a positive experience in that it really made them feel good that they were happily alive; others said that it made them appreciate life more. Others were seriously traumatized and remained obsessed with what had happened, sometimes for months on end, suffering from night terrors, insomnia and even cultivating eating disorders to cope. The more unstable ones wanted to share the gory details while others avoided that entirely, finding it utterly distasteful. A lot of what he read proved that a staggering amount of people were furious with the person who had committed suicide, especially if they were friends or relatives. There didn’t seem to be much of a common thread – except, of course, that everyone on the site wanted to talk; that’s why they flocked here.
    Doug found one woman particularly interesting. He liked how she called a spade a spade, how she was brutally honest and made no excuses for how she felt. He also found her sub-surface kindness and genuine concern for her fellow users delightful and somehow safe, if that was a state of mind anyone could have on such a site. Doug felt attracted to her, not in a romantic way, but as an accessible and knowledgeable person he could easily relate his story to. Her screen name made no secret of her past transgressions or what she had endured at the will of other suicides.
    She called herself “ The Suicide Queen ” because not only had she tried to commit suicide by overdose of sleeping pills in her attempt not “to get messy”, as she so aptly put it, but had also had the misfortune of seeing two suicides. One was of a teenage boy who hung himself after his girlfriend had left him and the other a very elderly uncle of hers who had suffered immensely from a long bout with cancer, a man in perpetual pain. Suicide Queen hinted that