I wrote this earlier tonight after drinking far too much 151 proof rum. My apologies if it doesn't make much sense or is morbid or whatever. I don't think I've ever really written this down before. Maybe I have though. If so I apologize for the redundancy.
A bit over ten years ago I died… although the timing might be wrong — maybe it was nine years. I don't really know. Anyway, it was a long time ago in a previous life.
It was a year after I'd dropped out of school, and my business had failed (stalled actually, but at the time it felt failed) and I was a pretty screwed up drug addict. I had no meaningful relationships, and probably the only person I was really close to (a good friend on IAM who those of you who know me will be able to identify) had problems of her own and at the time existed in a strange drugged vision as well.
Looking back on it now, I really don't know why I was depressed — my life really wasn't that bad. I guess objectively I just didn't have goals and didn't know who I was. I didn't know where I wanted my life to go, and while I wasn't really facing any hardships, I was just a messed up kid that was afraid to make a place for himself in the world. In a supreme act of cowardice and selfishness — and narcissism — I decided that suicide was right for me.
I don't know how I chose the day. People tend to blame it on relapse LSD use shortly before — but looking back on it I only remember wonderful things about that night… Standing on the roof of Future Bake Shop on Bloor and looking up into the sky and watching snowflakes come at me, and as I stepped across the tar shingles being amazed by the radiating patterns shooting out from my feet. In any case, a few weeks later when going home, at the last subway stop before my house I called my girlfriend from a payphone.
I think I told her something about finally doing it — I'd been talking about it for some time. There were tears I suspect (my memory gets hazy at this point) and when I got home I went to my basement room and sat on my bed with a cup of orange juice. A calm came over me — I really wasn't afraid of dying, and I think that there was a sense of security in knowing that it was all over.
I'd been saving all the pills that my idiot doctors had been misprescribing me. Actually, I hadn't just been saving them — they'd been “pre-prescribing” them to me in massive quantities so I had an enormous stockpile of toxic anti-psychotics and tranquilizers all laid out in front of me in little piles on the bed. Taking pills that you know are going to kill you is less strange and less frightening than you'd think. I just swallowed them. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't know if I didn't care, or was empty, or maybe it just felt right.
I don't remember thinking anything other than “well, I guess that's it then.”
I knew that I had about five minutes left to live (in consciousness anyway), and that seemed like a fair enough amount of time. There was no regret at all. Never once — and never once since — did it feel like the wrong decision.
There was nothing. It was over. I laid back, and just relaxed. I suppose a few minutes later I must have faded into unconsciousness, although I have no memory of that. To be honest, it was quite wonderful. Nothing to worry about. No commitments. Nothing — just peace. It really was what I expected — nothing at all. No light at the end of the tunnel. No fires of hell. Just nothing.
Blackness forever.
If you're looking to escape, suicide is the right course of action. It is truly the most effective way to eliminate your problems. Unfortunately it leaves out the fact that it's also nothing, which is of no value whatsoever. You see, there's no such thing as negative life. There's lack of life, and then there are scales up from that.
Anyway, I suppose I passed out at that point — and there occurs a one week hole in my memory. My uncle who I was living with happened to come home early from work and I arrived at the hospital where they restarted my heart and breathing. I have some patchy memories of Scott, Todd, and Saira being around me in the psyche ward (only Saira is still alive so she's the only record of those weeks), and of spitting out blood (I don't know why, but it was a good month before all the blood left my sinuses). I think somewhere over the last month of that I realize that while suicide was a great escape, I wasn't really looking for an escape. Even if my life sucked, a shitty life is still a lot better than no life at all.
And that's why I think suicide is stupid — because anything is better than nothing!
Of course, until you've experienced nothing that may be hard to believe?
