Chvrches - Final Girl

In the final cut
In the final scene
There's a final girl
And you know that she should be screaming now

Often, I feel sad when I think about my brother. Certainly my parents do. Certainly the rest of my family does, and his friends.

But I had to pick up his cell phone from the police and the laptop from the university. The police didn't access the devices - I had to break into and comb through both devices to find his suicide notes on the hard drive. He had a loaded printer in his dorm room, by the way. Was it so hard to print out those notes? He planned it out, you know. He went to the hardware store, and bought safety goggles and tools so he could break the window the "safe" way. But when I found the notes, I realized that he didn't even mention me once. Was it too much to expect, that someone who was sick could still remember me instead of discounting a full third of their immediate family?

And I used to always feel like I had a "way out." No matter how I'd feel on any particular day, I took comfort in the fact that no bad feeling could last forever, that if things ever got really out of hand, I could find a way out. Or that, if I grew up to be a complete and total failure, that he'd have his shit together and be able to make sure my parents were OK and make them proud. Or that we could help each other when we both got oldBut now I'm furious that he found that way out first, and closed the door behind him. My parents have only one kid left! The bar for success is now much lower, hovering around "not dying." But all that pressure, once distributed between two siblings, is now concentrated on one. So I resent my brother for getting to take the quick way out and leaving me behind on the long route.

It's been five years. I'm allowed to be sad. But I'm also allowed to be angry. Shivani said, that people with depression were often sadder than people with metastatic cancer, and I was like, no fucking shit, Sherlock, sometimes they even kill themselves. Krogoth says I scream nearly every night in my sleep. But how could I not? I am the final girl. I survived. He didn't.  

Haven't we seen a prompt like this before on day 12? This 30-day song challenge has taken far too long. 

This was one of the last songs I learned on piano before I was allowed to quit, with seven years of unenthusiastic musical education by an equally unenthusiastic teacher under my belt. I would probably have liked it better if anybody had bothered to explain who tf these composers were, why I had to learn a piece from List A, B, C, etc. and what was even the point of differentiation from the etudes. The music history course I did, which was eight weeks of intense memorisation of biographies and compositions, was by far the most painful schooling I had ever undertaken. Worse than the traffic course where the prof made us teach it to each other in weekly seminars. Worse than the hydrology course where the TA had a chip on his shoulder. I cried weekly in that history course. No other school or work made me leak from my eyeballs like music history did.

Also, I realized that I could just... quit the things I didn't like. Like the demand modelling course for my master's. Or the ITS course. Or grade 12 biology. But at the same time, I think I achieved more when I believed that failure wasn't an option, but giving myself mid-exam pep talks that vacillate between "People like you don't fail," or "You're gonna be doomed if you do poorly" was... unhealthy.