Chapter 2

Every suicide attempt is a story. Whether an attempt is a good story or not is simply a matter of conviction.

There are countless tales of fearless heroes who, without hesitation, achieve exactly what they set out to do, the instances when “attempt” seamlessly transitions into “accomplishment”: The taciturn ronin who spills himself on the tatami mat with a wakizashi, accepting that his honor and purpose have run their course, and thus life has as well. The star-struck, unwavering lovers with the apothecary’s poison and a dagger who know it would be better to perish completely than to live an existence devoid of love. The courageous monk who sets himself ablaze in a dazzling and unmatched protest for the sake of peace, rewarded with immortality when the same goddamn picture of him is plastered into the history books for decades to come.

Then there are the failures. The stories that no one really talks about.

Stories without heroes aren’t worth telling, really. We've all heard those forgettable tales in which people end up changing their mind halfway through their attempts, the stories of folks who yearn for death right up until it becomes a very possible outcome to their actions, as if they didn’t fully comprehend that a decision to seek out the ultimate end might actually lead to finding it. Like the scatterbrained idiots who get to the self-checkout line only to suddenly remember they still need a few things from aisle 10.

The losers.

A guy slowly bleeding out in the porcelain bathtub realizes he didn’t actually want to open his wrists with that box cutter he purchased on sale at Home Depot, and his wife will be just livid that he managed to stain her white bathmat red. A woman taking her first few chugs from a gallon of Spectracide Weed & Grass Killer has the epiphany that this wasn’t the best idea she’s had in the past week. Plus, the shit tastes downright awful. A recently laid-off schlub with his head shoved into an oven barely takes one huff of propane before he realizes his already financially strained family will either have to buy a new Kenmore or be forced to eat at least the next few Thanksgiving turkeys out of the same appliance that dad gassed himself with.

Something drastic changes. Resolve waivers and the mission that only an hour ago seemed so crucial is aborted. They call someone crying, desperate, scared, and an ambulance comes screeching to a halt outside the front door. The hero’s journey doesn’t end in a blazing triumph. It fizzles out the moment it begins.

If you really want to commit suicide, you have to actually commit. Say you decide you made a mistake too late into your story? What if that ambulance doesn’t get to you in time? If the precarious suicidal position you’ve placed yourself in can’t be reversed, do you really want your final moments of an already failed existence to be filled with regret, fear, or self-pity, sitting alone crying out “What have I done!?”

No dignity in that, nothing respectable, and certainly not how anyone should want to spend their last conscious minutes on the mortal plane.

That’s why you have to select a method that’s immediate and irrevocable, one that doesn’t allow time for that pesky, gnawing doubt or regret, triggered by the deep animalistic instinct to survive. That’s when failure hits. So you can’t wait for death - you need to bum rush that son of a bitch.

Take Hemingway, for instance. There’s no turning back from graffitiing the foyer walls with a double-barrel 12-gauge pointed just above your uvula.

Click. Gone. His auditory synapses probably didn’t even have enough time to register the boom.

Sometimes I’d imagine the writer’s family and friends solemnly picking specks of grey matter and impacted skull from the wall muttering, “Well, he was always a driven man.”

Second-guessing is for people without convictions, and I am a man of convictions. Just like Hemingway and the ronin and Romeo and Quang.

At least this is what I repeat to myself over and over again as I sit on the floor seizing up and shaking with a grimy knife against my wrist and a bottle of aspirin next to me, trying to decide which method will give me the most time to back out, which one will let me change my mind.

“I am a man of convictions."