April 28th
It all comes down to the voices: the ones in my head that accelerate and hit every hard corner of my prefrontal cortex, reverberating against every edge when the brain is only made of fine lines, memories, soft tissue and regret.
April 28th, 2018. Maybe regret is the emotion of that day: me, walking down the street at midnight, crying so hard I had to lie down on the cement, the dandelions that grew from the cracks in the sidewalk coming up to meet my body like a whisper in a crowd of voices, like dirt overtaking the dead.
It's hard to explain to someone who has never been suicidal what it's like. It's hearing every bad thing you can say about a human being and flinging it like jelly at a wall, but the wall is your mind, and you have no where to run - or to even duck and hide.
No one wants to know about the suicidal. It's a stigma, a cringey fact of life: there are people out there who want to die. As Sylvia Plath said: I do it exceptionally well.
Jack, Don, Nathan, Zeb. I repeated these names to myself, the names of the men who had rejected me most recently, and repeated them in my head until I'm sure my synapses were bleeding just trying to contain that sadness, that hurt, that fear of being incapable of someone loving me.
I was such a sob story, right? You're bored, about to click out of this screen. About to press "escape." Here's the thing: I wanted out, too.
I was twenty-five and just about done with myself.
Suicide, some say, is selfish. But how is erasing this sorry mess of a mind selfish? Aren't I doing everyone a favor? The dandelions came up to meet my body like so many little reminders of life, of all the strands of things that unravel in the end.
They say men are more likely to successfully commit suicide than women, and that they typically do it by more violent means: guns, hanging, etc.
"Successfully commit suicide." There really isn't a vernacular about this, is there? Who talks about this stuff?
After the swallowing of a half a bottle of Xanax, and the ER visit, and the subsequent sleeping for twenty hours - really, it's boring and clinical, the aftermath. It's just heartbreak, and regret - there it is, again. And the voices - they will never go away, not fully, not completely.
Self-involved, some say, attention-seeking. But until you've been there, until you're the one on the sidewalk, and being dead and underground seems a lot more appealing than continuing to suffer endlessly, until you're the one picking the dandelion fluff off your arms even hours later, in the ER - until you've been there, you just don't know.
You just don't. I can't explain to someone who wants to be alive, why you might not want to be. I just can't.
My dad asked me the next morning, after I woke up, as I was about to leave home, back to the realm of Jack, Don, Nathan, and Zeb: "Can you tell me what your name is and where you are going, and why?"
I slurred: "My name is _____, I am going to Boston, and I am going to survive this."