For Those Considering Suicide

There is the will to live. There is a lack of will to live. There is a will to die. Where and why does one slip into another? While I'm standing on the sunny side of the shore, how can I bottle my reasons to go on and pass them out to people who don't feel the same stability?

I'm lucky; I knew my fundamental reason for living by high school. I have something more tenable than faith or goals or people: experience. I live to experience things. The senses themselves blow my fucking mind on a regular basis; all the colors of the world, the nature of color, light, the nature of light, how these visual cues tickle and stimulate and set off things inside the hugeness of life and feeling. And that's just a teeny tiny slice of one sense. Don't get me started on touch. If I feel more pain than the average person because I'm more aware of tactile sensations, I think I'm willing to take my migraines as a sacrifice. Mind you, I'm not in the midst of a migraine right now, but I did have one the last few days and it messed with my Great Life Plans, and I will gladly give up Great Life Plans for a will to live that life. Because that's the fundamental piece of being alive that death, suicide or otherwise, will most likely end: tasting the world, tingling fingers under a hot faucet, smelling memories in damp wood staircases.

One friend faced with the sudden death of a colleague, jarred again by her own mortality. The rug can get yanked out from under us at any time, but we fool ourselves whenever possible, we forget and concentrate on the long-term blur, the big picture, the daily minutia.

Another friend says the biggest thing between himself and suicide is the means.

Today, while I remember my love for existence, death terrifies me. It seems such an easy mistake to make, it's everywhere. I'm not done yet.

Now how do I give every person who ever has and ever will contemplate suicide a drink of my reason to live? Can I go back to younger me and understand it better? Harness its power and pour it over the universe? Would it seep into all the cracks in all the hearts and souls everywhere? Do I have to go around with a caulk gun and give spot treatments to those in arms length (plus booster shots to myself, of course)? Or is this all an exercise in futility, like my other desperations, trying to eke some meaning out of another night of words words words words words...

Grave Robbing

At an estate sale, I sift behind Death's recent visit, life's recent departure. A calendar with a meeting marked on August 17th that wasn't attended. Crutches and walkers in a corner, adult diapers- things that herald the end of life. And then, nothing. No more use for all the things accumulated over a lifetime. Things things so many things. Why do we make more things when so many already exist? Humanity will never run out of things. I swoop in and buy things that people forgot they had long before they died. I sell them to other people who will forget them, but I also fill my house to make it pretty and warm and feel like something I made. A nest of things, a living space work of art that should somehow express oneself, welcome others, aggrandize, and still be a comforting home.

A man in the bookstore said he'd seen me three times today. Apparently he was at the antique store, too. I hadn't noticed him.