bullets or bitters?

"It feels so much like falling
dying while I wait to die
the fear of something or nothing
lonely empty lie..."
-Flyleaf, Much Like Falling

"I'm on my way to hell,
well I've tried
God knows that I've tried..."
-Brand New, Noro

"When are you leaving here?" a coworker asked me one day.

"5:30," I replied.

"No, I mean leave leave," he said.

"Oh.  Whenever I get up enough courage to take that entire bottle of Tylenol I have in my medicine cabinet."

He just laughed.  "Uh, no, I mean just quitting this job."

"Well, once that Tylenol has absorbed, that'll be my resignation."

He laughed again.  "You're warped."

"Yeah...I know.  Hence the Tylenol."

I was joking.  Mostly.  But even though I was kidding around, it occurred to me that I kid about suicide a lot.  And back before I was moved to a different department,  when I wasn't busy and the boss was away for the day, I often slipped to the edge of my counter and wrote.  One day, a supervisor came through, saw me, and said, "What are you writing there?"

Without missing a beat, I said, "My suicide note."  She too laughed and kept walking.  I guess she didn't take me seriously or maybe my coworkers all laughed out of discomfort.  It makes sense.  I can dish it out to others but I don't know how I would react if I found someone who could match my morbidity.  I might be a little uncomfortable, too.

I often think about dying, about getting out of this place, out of my skin, shimmying my way out of the mess I have made of my life.  If I'm left too idle, if I'm not distracted by television or music, I think about my life and it horrifies me.  It settles in that this is my life, this is what I've become.  It's hard to realize this is not practice.  I'm not test driving life.  I'm living it and I'm hating it.  When I sit back and really think about where I am and how I'm living, it makes me so despondent.  It's like, this is really it.  This isn't a fantasy.  This isn't a book or a movie where things are comically bad until I win the lottery or fall in love and everything is suddenly wonderful on the series finale.  There are days when I want nothing more than to just get out, you know, to just hit the eject button and be done.

There's always been a part of me that has longed for death, from being a little boy who prayed to God to kill me in my sleep so I would never have to wake up again to working at the electronic bingo facility a couple of years ago and nearly driving myself off the road.  I got into my car and made the hour and a half trip to and from the job and I often thought about crashing my car into a light pole or tree or even just accelerating as fast as my little Honda would allow until I swerved off the cement and into oblivion.  Maybe I'd lose control and flip.  My neck would snap, my spine would break, my brain would squish between the tree bark and transmission.  Or  maybe I'd just rupture my spleen and be taken to the hospital, stitched up and sent home to face the anger of my parents over totaling my car.

One night, I even tested it.  I gripped the steering wheel tight and pressed down on the accelerator harder and harder.  My heart rate climbed with the speedometer.  I wanted to see how it would feel to become unattached from myself, to witness the process of losing control and separating from my flesh, from my life.  But it only lasted a few moments.  I was too much of a coward to carry on with the crash.  I was not yet prepared.

I knew I'd die one day.  I just never really thought about how I would die.  I wanted to be killed but I never put much effort into thinking I'd be the one to get to do the honors.  But if/when I get to that point, how would I do it?

Over the years, I've encountered stories of botched suicides, unfortunate incidents of people surviving self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head, only to end up as a vegetable and a burden on their families, perhaps trapped in the very state they were trying to escape from.  I've heard of people surviving falls, pills, and hangings.  With my luck, I won't succeed in my suicide, either.  Not only would I not be dead but I would have to face the embarrassing episode of trying to explain to my family why I tried it, that I was sad and wanted out.  I wonder if my mom would believe me then.  I've tried telling her before that I felt genuinely depressed but she never believed me, just shrugged it off as passing sadness.

Sometimes it's not the external conflicts but the mental massacre my brain has to endure day after day.  That's why some people just don't get it.  They look at it from the outside but they have no way of seeing what's on the inside and the one who suffers often has a hard time articulating it.  I don't have it all that bad.  I have a job.  I am not scraping for food or money.  But I'm scraping for a semblance of life without pain, a mind without disease, a heart without acid.  There is something wrong in my head, something so totally off that it affects every part of me, stains every aspect of my life, from my connections to people to my career aspirations to my diet to my will to live.

I'm not going to kill myself right away.  I have to work up the courage first.  But I will not grow old.  I've looked into my future and I honestly cannot construct a projection in which I am there.  I can't see myself being gray and alone.  I will be crushed by the weight of everything long before then.  I'm not strong.  I will not survive myself.  I have a half-plan: I'll give it a few more years, just to see if anything changes, if maybe I happen to actually win the lottery or fall in love.  It seems simple, silly even.  But at this point, it's going to take such a miracle to steer me away from the ditch.  The funny thing is I don't believe in miracles anymore.

But if nothing changes, the question goes back to the method.  I could try carbon monoxide.  I just don't have any enclosed spaces to use.  On an unrelated note: does anyone have a garage they wouldn't mind letting me borrow?

My dad has a gun that he keeps in his underwear drawer, buried beneath his tightie whities and gray tube socks.

I don't want to hurt my family, of course.  But at the same time, we're all so disconnected.  My dad barely looks at me and my sister doesn't like me and when I look at my mom, all I can see is her disappointment over being a failure at everything.  Still having to depend on her financially when I should be independent.  It hurts me so much because I don't want to be a burden.  I don't want anyone else to have to carry the weight of my inadequacies and depression.  I don't want to cause them any more pain but I'm in so much that I can barely stand it some days.  I get out of bed and eat breakfast and put my on my clothes and go to work and no one knows what's going on.  I can laugh and joke all I want but it doesn't make a difference to me.  If ever there were a random "get out of life" free card, I'd draw it in an instant.

There are a couple of reasons why I stay here.  I feel like, under the right circumstances, I could have a lot to offer the world.  I had a lot of love in my heart for people at one time and I feel like I could probably bring that back if it weren't buried underneath all this bitterness.  But if I had friends and a good job and my own place to live, I think it would lift some of that heavy weight off my heart.  I really do.  I'm under no illusion that everything will be perfect but it would be a nice start.

I also don't want to go to hell.  I've talked in length about this before but it bears repeating, seeing as how it's something I still haven't been able to reconcile.  I've basically given up on God entirely so there's a great chance I'm going to hell anyway but even if there was a sliver of hope that I'll make it to heaven, I don't want to squash that hope by offing myself.  Of course, I also heard from a influential Christian that suicide isn't an automatic ticket to hell.  It was reassuring and dangerous at the same time.  If I ever did do it, maybe I won't burn for eternity.  But his words also kind of gave me the A-OK to cut myself wide open.  But of course, that's only one Christian opinion, which is annoying trait of that religion.  Ask one hundred different Christians the same question and you'll get one hundred different answers.

I'm just so tired.  I'm tired of the monotony of my job and the terrible people I work for and with and the public.  I'm tired of not having any money.  I'm tired of seeing everyone around me getting along just fine, even with their own problems, but I can't seem to get past mine.  I've never been in a relationship or had a good friend to lean on.  I feel like filler.  I am just another body to spend money and occupy the road and sell clothing and pass in and out of everyone's life.  I come and go but do not resonate.  I am vapor.  I am exhaust.  I am slowly fading every day, falling into obscurity, receding into the background before being blotted out entirely.

I don't know about love or adventure and I can't find out because I have no money to venture past my room.  I have the box that I sleep in and the box that I drive and the box that I work in and I shuffle from one to the other, my eyes circled and bleary, my heart shriveled and dark.  I shed tears that don't soothe, eat food that doesn't heal and shout into the nothingness that consumes me until I'm hoarse and tired enough to fall asleep only to reluctantly wake up another day.

I've always been a foregone conclusion.  Even as a child, I was prone to fits of terrible sadness for no apparent reason.  I grew up and tried to grow out of it, at least tried to control it so as to appear normal, all the while thinking to myself that maybe I would get better, that something inside would finally click into place but I see now that I was likely born defective, that there would be nothing to click in place because I'm missing some vital parts.  I am incomplete.  A boy without color.  A heart without happiness.  A soul without spark.

I am unreachable, inconsolable, irrevocably shattered.

I was flipping through several television channels one day when I came across an interview with Montel Williams.  He described the pain associated with his Multiple Sclerosis and how it got so bad that he wanted to take his life.  He said it was no way to live and he added that no one had the right to tell him how he should live just to feel good about themselves.  Why should they tell him to hold on just to watch him continue to writhe in pain?  His description of his decision to die by his own volition really struck a chord with me.

He was talking about physical pain but there are days when I feel nearly unbearable emotional pain.  What kind of life am I living when all I want to do is get out of it?  How am I helping anyone when I can't help myself?  But I don't know what real pain is.  I'm no different than any other aimless twenty-something so why do I feel this way?

Then again, comparing pain isn't always practical.  It doesn't matter what anyone else has endured because the virus of hopelessness is universal, touching the poor and the privileged.  It doesn't matter what you've endured or accomplished once it's made its way to your heart, emptying you out little by little.  And that's me.  I have no past to grieve, no present to celebrate, and see no future to look forward to.  I carry that hopelessness with me always, sometimes muffled but never mute, wearing me down day after day.  I try to find purpose.  I try to find God.  I try to find myself.  I always come up empty-handed.  Whenever I think I've finally captured something, that hopelessness wracks my wrists and wrenches the fulfillment free from my grasp.

I am not alone in feeling lost, hurt, helpless.  But I am left to deal with the pain on my own.  It hasn't gotten easier over the years.  It never will.