My name is Felix Rivers, and I was tired of life.
When I was born, my mother named me Felix with her dying breath, wishing I would be lucky. It was a cruel irony as I was anything but.
My father didn't see a son when he looked at me; he saw the hospital bills and the empty side of the bed where my mother should have been. He became an alcoholic with hair-trigger anger issues. According to my distant aunt, he had once been a kind man, but I never saw that version of him. I only knew the man whose heavy boots on the stairs meant I had to hide under the bed, and whose belt was the only affection I ever received.
When I turned sixteen, I tried to take control of my fate. I applied for emancipation and took a job at a small, shady restaurant on the edge of town. I thought it was my ticket out. Instead, I traded one cage for another.
My employer was a predator who smelled my desperation. He knew I couldn't report him without risking going back to my father's house, so he stated exploiting me. He docked my pay for "broken dishes" I never touched and forced me to work double shifts for free, threatening to call my father or the police if I complained.
I lived on expired canned soup and my phone with e-reader app open.
That was my only escape.
While my body was bruised from work and my stomach was empty, my mind was soaring through adventures in fantastical worlds with cultivators going against the heavens to achieve immortality or heroes savings the world from demon lords.
Enduring through life, I somehow finished college with a mountain of student loan debt. I thought a degree would be my salvation. I just wanted a life where I didn't have to look over my shoulder.
Eventually, at the age of 20, I landed a "stable" job as an accountant in a mid-sized company and things finally started to look up for me.
But the universe wasn't done with me. Only a month into my new job, I discovered a series of discrepancies in the company ledgers, indicating embezzlements of huge amouns of money. Before I could report it, my manager, a man who had smiled at me every morning, handed the police a paper trail that pointed directly at me. He had used my login, my signature, and my desperate background to paint me as a thief.
I was arrested in front of the whole office.
I used the last of my savings just to breathe the air outside of a holding cell for a few days.
With no money for a lawyer, I realized all I ad to look forward to was a life in prison for a crime I didn't commit.
So yeah, I was tired of living.
Deciding to end it all I started my march towards the nearby river, but suddenly my phone sounded the ping of an new message.
As I took my phone out to read the message I didn't notice they there was a puddle of water in front of me and tell right through with my phone launched in the air and my text message app open which showed:
"Don't give up on life so soon, my Felix. ~Mom"