I had just came from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit.. and wanted to shoot myself, but why? My best friend Leah.
“What if I just want to die?” She had asked me. Being heavy on alcohol, I had just casually responded
“Then I will be sad and disappointed that you cheated yourself out of your chance at existence. Not all of us have that opportunity, you know, to choose life.
She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She never cried because she was afraid that something ‘would’ happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, ‘would not’ happen.
However, I had decided to have her back no matter what state she was in. I wasn’t any better than her. I handed her a other glass of whiskey and her mood was suddenly in free fall, a state I knew all too well. A heaviness inside. A hollow loneliness. A need to either quarrel or cry. A downward plunge that could only be escaped by huge loss of temper, howling for her mother, or what people like teachers called going too far. Trouble on the way. I was at a loss.
I just held her hand with emptiness in me, waited for some minutes then gently released her. Though she was my best friend, she only came to me in her lowest moments. Yes I should have been a gentleman and always hold her hand but this particular moment I didn’t. I was full of hatred for the fact like she never really cared about me as I did for her.
At some moments, though I know how evil of me it was, I found happiness and satisfaction in her suffering and that’s why everyone hated me. I was some kind of a a plague, an outcast. Of my own weakness and stupidity, of my magic, of the stubbornness and pride, and, last of all, hatred of Tim, who had started it all, the hatred swayed to pity. Then to hopelessness. Then back to anger.
Every once in a great while, I felt a moment of peace, usually when I caught a glimpse of Tim and Joy together. I loved them both in different ways, but that could not be. They were both my best friends, my favorite couple at times but I also hated them with passion. I turned away from the party, and the cycle began again, because never in my life had I ever been picked when there was another alternative, even by these two I called my best friends.
I felt like I’m a snow globe and someone shook me up and now every little piece of me was falling back randomly and nothing was ending up where it used to be. Leaving the party, I thought to myself that maybe there was a galaxy with a planet that was just a little more tilted, with a sun that shone just a little bit darker, and that’s where I was supposed to be, where it somehow wound make sense to feel this broken. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within me that no sign of it appeared on the surface, I had been implanting it, and it would rise up a thousand fold in the future. I just didn’t know that that future would come this fast and that it was already here with me.
As I walked down the dark alley into the pedestrian walkway along the busy highway, I constantly wondered which of my feelings were real. Which of the me’s was me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Suicidal? Depressed maybe.
The thing about depression; When I felt it deeply, I didn’t want to let it go. It became a comfort. I wanted to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I wanted to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It was mine. I wanted to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time. For a moment I was lost deep inside me that I didn’t notice the speeding car just before I crossed the road. I managed to take a step back but the side mirror didn’t miss my head. Everything went dark for a moment, then a moment of indifference, then some comfort followed .
I wasn’t sure whether I was on a hospital bed, dead in the ice cold mortuary shelves or already on my way to heaven, hell or Valhalla (yes, I partly believed in Danelaw). I spend a lot of time wondering what dying feels like. What dying sounds like. If I’ll burst like those notes, let out my last cries of pain, and then go silent forever. Or maybe I’ll turn into a shadowy static that’s barely there, if you just listen hard enough.
I had never thought that this is how it felt like, ultimate peace and carefree of all the struggles of the world. Yes, I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from “suicidal ideation” on an almost daily basis. In other words, for as long as I can remember, the thought of ending my life came to me frequently and obsessively. However, it was just a thought I never thought I would actually try.
The ongoing struggle to achieve a profound harmony between the deepest and most conflicting impulses of myself, life and death, instated the murkiness of my soul. The battle against the amorphousness of sin and depravity, and seeking unity and clarity, trace their origins to the primeval fire that launched humanity. This ancient warfare for control of the soul allowed me to create myself. Because of the primordial inconsistences between ecstasy and reason, I was the repentant artist of my being. I was a beardless, sensuous, and androgynous sculptor, the redeemer and the transformer of my naked self.
I had never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fought when my mind splintered and raced, to swallow me into my own madness, again, like this one.
I think I just loved being with my novels because they didn’t make me feel bad. I get it too. When I was with them, they didn’t care that I was kind of weird, or that I’d gotten into trouble for drinking too much and using drugs(which apparently I did a lot of). They didn’t ask me a bunch of stupid questions about how I felt, or why I did what I did. They just let me be who I was.
I had concluded that there was a pleasure in the pathless woods. There was a rapture on the lonely shore, a society, where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar.
However, the fear of not living was a deep, abiding dread of watching my own potential decompose into irredeemable disappointment when ‘should be’ got crushed by what was. I thought it would be easier to die than to face that, because ‘what could have been’ is much more highly regarded than ‘what should have been.’ Dead kids are put on pedestals, but societal rejects like myself are always looked down upon and dragged till they drown. I wasn’t ready for that agony.
My eyes opened for a second and my scent came back. Faintly in my earls I could hear the ECG machine beeping. I was on a bed, in the dark. I finally understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop. And I had to. I pulled out the IV injected on my arm, with all the might I had left, covered my eyes and waited for fate to decide my destiny.
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