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...

On Buffy

Earlier this week at the bar, I found myself completely mesmerized by the tv. I've always been mesmerized by the tv, but this was stronger than the usual hypnotic pull. So in my campaign to avoid doing anything useful with my time, I decided to watch Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its entirety on Hulu. I'm a big fan of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible and I'd never actually seen Buffy (Mr. Whedon's more frequently referenced creation). Was 1997 really that long ago?

I feel a little like puke, but I brought it on myself by eating the cookies I originally bought for my cousin's birthday. They were going to be stale before I saw her again, but that didn't mean I had to be the one to eat them. They were just so tasty.

I wonder what it would be like if I could do and eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted without physiological repercussions. I also wonder what it would be like to be blind, starving, an insect, or live a thousand years from now.

I want more cookies.

Soylent Green

Today I will be spend knitting in a hospital waiting room. My friend is having a procedure that is not in itself scary but does require some major slicing and dicing and should tell us (though not immediately) if it's something much worse. I'm scared, and I'm not the one being chopped up. Isn't there some rule against young, spry people having terrible diseases? There's so much else to worry about when you're a 20-something, and almost everything is a beginning. At least, the things you have to choose are about beginnings - careers, significant others, babies, where and how to live your life. And we act like it's all within our control, simply a matter of deciding and finding and doing. But whether it's fate or God or random variation or a powerful malicious monkey, there's just so much mortality thrown in there, mocking our choices and making them for us. Things our bodies do and don't do that we not only failed to take into account, but that make all our accounting seem silly and frivolous. We try so hard to explain and justify and ignore our mortality because we need to cope. The Unknown is terrifying. I am terrified. Part of me wants to "take the blue pill" and ignore such mortality and complete lack of control, but how can I? It's the choice to pretend it's all a choice, and I'm not even sure I wish it was a choice.

All this and more will remain unresolved. Frustrating.