I'ts over. Is it?

Then...Its Over

What does Brent Runyon feel today/ while he writes, about his story? The tone of this memoir is fixed at the beginning of the book when we know that he is going to commit suicide, when he tells us. After burning himself he tells us how his life changed forever after that one awful mistake.

Before I tell you about what he feels after the accident, I am going to tell you what happened during he was lighting himself on fire. It really happened in a matter of seconds, the whole aftermath of the ‘lighting himself on fire’ is about 300 pages long, when in reality the burning part lasts about 1 page.

We don’t get a lot of feelings from the author in this moment, it just happens. Then its over. He uses very focused sentences and tells us exactly what we want to hear.

“I can’t breathe. I’m screaming” pg 20 Really short but painful sentences in which we don’t understand what he really feels since he expresses little or no emotions towards the fact that he has set himself on fire. He has not understood the magnitude of the subject. He will soon understand what he did and he wont like to “Find out what death is like.” Pg 20 Very robotic choice of words, at the moment he isn’t really expressing much, but he will.

Then, when he arrives to the hospital we can see how lonely Brent was and he feels as if he were different from everybody else.

“And everybody’s talking, but nobody’s talking to me. Somebody just said my urine is red. I don’t want red urine. I want to cry and I want to sleep. I want to go back.” Page 23

‘I want to go back’ shows us how much he regrets what he did and that he grew up to realize that what he did was in fact irrational and that he “didn’t have anything to be sad about” pg 94. Here, he is very genuine and honest about what he felt in the moment and what he feels now. We notice that when he wrote this he really meant this and he wanted to let us know that he didn’t really want to be in the place that he was in.

In this part of the book we can see that until know only in the first moments of his mistakes he has already learned about what it is to be an adult and that one decision can change your life forever.

He is constantly telling us how much he wants to be back home and that he doesn’t want to be in the place that he is in right now.  

“They tell me that home is fine and I’ll be home soon. But I want to be home now.” Pg 26

 We can feel that the author understood he made a mistake and that he now looks back and is willing to accept the fact that what he did was wrong and that he was in a really bad place in his life.

Sometimes in life we don't understand what we are doing, until we do. Sometimes we don't know what we had, until we loose it.