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Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: In your mind...
I am currently:  
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Triggering - Part of my book *suicide**SI mentioned*
Just to catch you up, I'm writing a book about SI, that's based partially off of my own experiences and partially off what I believe would have happened if I had done something different at a different junction in life. This part is a memory of mine, and the book is post-modern, so I go off on flashback tangents a lot. In the book, the name of my ex is Alexander, but his real name was Marcus. This is the beginning of chapter four, I think. I haven't completely decided. Anyways...here we go.
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Once, Alexander asked me how I knew it would be pills.
It was during the summer, when the sweltering heat made us think of philosophical questions, such as whether the hymns we sang meant anything more than a Saturday morning cartoon, and how we would commit suicide if ever given the opportunity.
And though I had often thought of the question, and had convinced myself that slitting the throat was the most appropriate death, my mouth opened, and out of the cavern came the idea of an overdose.
Afterwards, I realized how appropriate it was. After all, I was a collector of sorts.
Whenever I am prescribed a medicine, good or bad, I keep what I don’t take, just in case. Even years after, when it is bound to have expired, I still have it on hand.
Pills have a glamorous glow for me. It’s a very Americanized way of dying. Marilyn Monroe, whether accidental or deliberate, died of pills. Esther Greenwood took pills. My favorite passage from Susanna Kaysen’s journal involves the entry where she explained the morning where she woke up and knew that her task that day was to swallow thirty pills.
It didn’t matter that the success rate wasn’t that high. Still, the fact remained that I, like every other American, had been taught to turn to a capsule for success and health. We use pills to fix absolutely everything, and there are pills to fix the problems that your other medications have given you. No one asks how it works. You just take it, and problems melt.
The world was my problem.
I had, of course, considered my options. Hanging fleeted through my mind. It was feasible, but I couldn’t bear the idea of all that twisting and turning afterwards, my body just swaying from my last motion. I’ve been twisting and turning my entire life. I refused to allow my death to be spent in a similar condition.
While driving down the road, I considered steering my car toward a cement wall. It was only the dreadful thought that someone could say it was an accident that kept me from it. I didn’t want the cause of my death to be handed over so lightly to a higher power.
No, the death I chose would be deliberate and quiet. Hypothetically, of course. Because lying there, staring at the sky, I knew the conversation was only philosophical. Cutting had no connection to suicide.
It was the one of the few times when I was with him that he wasn’t right on top of me, leering troll-like in my face, domineering and overwhelming me with his nicotine scented clothing. He lay beside me, smirking at my answer patronizingly.
“Pills?”
“Yes. I think that’s how I would go.”
“You wouldn’t. You’d slit your wrists, like everyone else.”
I decided not to examine his statement. He laughed softly, and I thought how calm and dangerous he looked, with the sun behind his head, outlining his jackal smile and cruel curve of his nose.
“Why do you think you’d kill yourself that way?”
“It just seems easier.”
“If you want easy, use a gun. That’s the way I would go.”
I nodded, but internally I cringed. I hated the idea of suicide by gun. Yet again, it was so easy to pin as an accident, and it was so sudden. Births can sometimes take hours, and I believed strongly in balance. I didn’t want instantaneous. I wanted a crawling kind of power. I wanted to plan that last thought before I drifted off.
Alexander’s hand crept to my stomach, and up slowly. Fixing my eyes on the clouds overhead, I lay perfectly still, sure that if I didn’t move, perhaps he would forget that I was there, and his searching hands and eyes would search elsewhere.
I liked it when he would just hold me gently around the waist or shoulders, and wait for me to come to him, but those moments he always broke with searching, greedy hands. Sometimes it hurt. I just assumed that’s how relationships were.
His thumb jarred my cringing face in his direction, and I glanced numbly into his eyes, smiling back at me with the power of ownership. His words shifted out in folds and whispers, making me think of wolves grinning out of the dark.
“Of course, you wouldn’t kill yourself, would you baby?”
“No.”
Alexander winked, a conspiring subjugator. “Because you know I would rather kill you myself than allow you to do that.”
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