Back when I was 14, maybe 15, and still dating my ex, suicide wasn't an abnormal topic between either of us. It was never something we really truly planned, we sure as hell didn't have a pact, but it wasn't uncommon for us to joke about it at the very least - or at the end of some long rant, just go, "maybe I should just blast my brains out". This is still a habit I have today.
We both grew up military, we were born in the same hospital on base, he lived 10 minutes away from me and technically that was off-base but the town next to it was basically just considered an extension of the place. Nobody lived here unless they had family here, or god forbid, were stationed themselves. Death wasn't uncommon at all, we grew up during the height of the Great War on Terror, both of our dads were constantly deployed either in Afghanistan, or occasionally South Korea. We were taught in school how to handle that impending threat of someone we knew dying, the fear of our parents returning home and their memory being a folded flag and a black band for a bracelet. We got lucky, both of our parents survived, but I have a lot of aunts and uncles that didn't.
Most of them didn't die to the actual war, I actually can't recall anyone important to me who did. They always killed themselves afterwards, when they came home. I knew people who weren't actually deployed but the sheer environment of that place drove them to their own death. Nobody overdosed, it was always a gun, or a car accident. One drank herself to death in a bar, but that had been probably unintentional. My dad still wears his memorial bracelet to his best friend, my mom still posts on facebook every year pictures of her crying at her best friend's funeral while the officer in front of her holds that folded flag.
We both knew, generally, that shooting yourself was the best way to go. He had never attempted like I did, but it was a sort of common sense that it was the quickest, least painful death (if you did it right). The thing is, neither of us had a gun. It wasn't that there wasn't one at all in our households, there was at least one at all times nearby, we both had been taught how to handle and shoot one since we were young - but it wasn't ours. We knew better than to use our father's guns to kill ourselves, because that was just rude, it'd be going too far, as if the act of taking our life was somehow less worse than possibly disrespecting a weapon that was made to do nothing but that. That the image attached to that gun was more important than our lives.
We're both adults now, we don't really talk anymore, things haven't marginally improved in our lives since. Suicide is still this looming, overbearing thought to either of us. I know it is for me. My mom's gun still sits on her dresser, I don't touch it because I still know better. But I think eventually, I'll be able to learn that my life is more important than that gun, not because I killed myself but because I'll live in a world where I won't need one.
