Cassette 8: Side A 

Hello boys and girls. Hannah Baker here again. What? Have you thought it´s over now? Well, then you must have got the shock of your life when you found the brown envelope with this last tape inside in your mailbox. But I can calm you down. This is the last one and there is just one side on it. Why you should trust me now?                                                                                                                                                                         I thought it would be quite funny to send you this tape as my personal legacy. See it as a little reminder. This tape is for you. Let me be clearer, it´s for everyone who hears my voice at the moment. Don´t be confused. All of you got one of those little tapes and trust me, if you don´t listen to it, I´ll know or at least Tony will. And you can imagine what will happen then. The copies of the other tapes will be released in a very public manner.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  But to make it more interesting for you, the rules have changed a bit. Rule number one: You listen. Number two: You try to be a nice good guy or girl, who lives his or her life in harmony with the people around you. *Laugh*. No, this would be wishful thinking I guess. But this time you don´t have to pass them on to the next one of the list, because as I’ve already said, everyone got this cassette. In between the last name on the list, who listened to the original tapes and this surprise, lies one week. Why do I know that? Because I´m the leader of this game. Time enough for all of you to think. There is one last thing I want to mention here. If you think I´m a crazy drama queen, who just killed herself for attention and wants to break all of you, by hunting you after my death, let me say this clear: Fist of all, I´m not. If so, I was.  But I wasn´t. At least not from my point of view and I have checked this point many times. And I didn´t kill myself for attention. I did it because the world had become too much to cope with for a long time. Yeah, eventually I was looking for something easier than my everyday life, my mind, my thoughts. There were times, where my thoughts would circle faster and faster, they would keep spinning even when I told them to stop and they would form a spiral. Thoughts like: Is today a good day to….  And this spiral of thoughts would go all the way down. There wouldn´t be a way out of it. No light, just darkness.  I’ve never found the solution anyway. At one point I couldn´t even see the place where everything has started going wrong. I just feel like a burden, to me, to everyone. That sounds crazy? Does it?                    For you I guess, it must be so. But to me it feels real. My thoughts are real. To me. Like hard facts. Yes, I´m desperate.                                       No offense, but how would you feel, if your deepest secrets would be told out loud? And let´s be honest… Everybody got a chapter they don´t want anyone to know about. I want you to understand, that my intention wasn´t and isn´t about teaching you a lesson. No means to an end. It´s not beautiful or romantic. And these tapes are not tragic for the purpose of entertainment. If you need my story to realize that you should treat people nicer, then there is clearly something fundamentally wrong with our nation, and then these tapes aren´t going to fix it. Perhaps we can begin with being aware of our impact on others. That we influence each other. Everybody is slightly connected to the others and maybe we aren´t going to recognize it at first, but its palpable. Anyway, “what´s past is prologue” I guess. We can´t change anything. We can´t take things back. But I want you to understand how I felt, because now I’m hardly feeling anything anymore. And this is maybe the hardest for you, cause you can´t know someone else´s hurt, not really. Every loss is unparalleled. A boy unknown to me once said: The worst part of being truly alone is that you think about the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being all by yourself, and you turn out to be a terrible company. And I am my own terrible company. What to do with someone like me? What to do when a boy or a girl in your school is being bullied by someone? Isn’t it easier to look away at times? Especially when the harassed person is somebody you barely knew? Does this make a difference? Is it reprehensible to have thoughts like   “I should say something now, but...” “What should the others think of me, when…”? Or maybe you even catch yourself thinking “what if they are right? What if all the rumours are true? Or at least some of them?”? Don´t panic. Everybody gets these thoughts. I guess we are who we are for our actions, though. When you think, you can´t control everything that comes to your mind. You can’t even stop thinking. But our actions will last. They count. And sometimes they come too late.                                                                                                                         I don´t blame you. I don´t judge you. Because I could have done something, but I didn’t.                                                                                               I hope you do better next time.