As I opened the door, the first thing I saw was the dust. No matter where you looked, that was the first thing you saw. A thin film of it was hanging over everything. No one had been in here in a long time, and that fact was fairly obvious. I'd been avoiding his room for a decade now but I'm alone now. The hinges squeaked, requiring more force to swing open than they had years ago, or maybe that's just me being too weak to enter. My footprints left noticeable gaps on the floor, and my breath was enough to stir dust from around the room. The first thing I had to do before I could even bother to look around was open a window, unless I died of suffocation.

As the rays of sunshine hit the room for the first time in a decade, being hidden by the curtains, I could feel the catch in my throat. The tears started to build and I gulped, hard, to suppress them. The pain was overwhelming, all of his belongings seeming to scream that it was my fault he was dead, my fault alone. I took a couple of steps to his desk and I hit the power button on the old Compaq. The sound was deafening, the whirring of the fan stirring up even more dust and sending another wave around the room.

It took a couple of minutes, but soon the monitor lit up with a photo of us all. I remember when it was taken in our backyard, a mere month before he died. I remembered my wife staring at a copy of the photo in her hands a decade ago, screaming how he looked so happy. How he never could have been so depressed to take his life. The tears started to spill, landing on the keyboard tray.

On the desktop was a word document that was set apart from everything else, a file laid on top of my face. I double clicked it, waited for it to open, and set about reading. Each word was a stab to the heart, each line more painful than the last. The tears weren't stopping now, a small lake forming on the wood below my head. The suicide note of a child is something no parent should have to read.

Yet with the pain came the clarity. 10 years later and I could remember, crisply, every second of the day this was written, and my mind poured through the details as it did every day for the past decade. Waking up in the morning and cooking us all eggs and bacon. It was a saturday so the three of us were going to go to the park and enjoy the sunshine. My wife got a call for a shift at the hospital and she had to go, leaving the two of us.