9.22.2010

Suicide

For the first time in nearly eight years, I seriously considered suicide today. I don't know why. I do know why, that is a lie that dare not dwell on for fear of glorifying it.

I have to admit, I think about suicide a lot. All the time, really. But it's always merely a passing a thought—it comes and goes very quickly; like that shadow of a thing you don't know, that you cannot know. You see it run across the wall in the night and there is no way to know what it was, where it came from, where it went to, or whether you will ever see it again.

Yeah. It's a lot like that.

Sometimes you don't even know whether you really even saw it at all. All that remains of that shadow is the faint memory that you saw it, and that it momentarily scared the shit out of you.

There are times, though, that the shadow doesn't move so quickly. When it invades your home, your bedroom, creeps its way into the most personal spaces of your life and just stands there, just silently glides across the room, dancing from wall to wall in the moonlight. There he is! There! He is staring at you from the corner of your room. He is in the doorway now, beckoning you to "come, follow" with his tree branch fingers. You pull the covers over you and violently shake your head to get it out of your mind, but this is no dream; this is not merely your imagination playing tricks on you. No, no, there really is a demon in your bedroom, and he really is trying to kill you, but he knows he is powerless over you, physically' so he attempts to lure you to your death by convincing you to take your own life. He will whisper to you, "life is meaningless; there is no Truth; there is no Life; there is nothing to look forward to; there is nothing at all." If that doesn't work, he will take a more personal approach: "Your life is nothing; your life is meaningless; there's nobody for you; you have no future." If you haven't followed him to the threshold of death yet, he will insult you, screaming over and over, "You are a loser! You are a failure! You are a mistake! Nobody gives two fucks about you! Nobody will miss you! Nobody cares about you! Everybody hates you! God Himself won't even save you! Why don't you curse God and die!"

Lies, lies, lies, all of them lies.

These are the lies I've been told everyday for a long time. I have seen that demon in the night, standing in the corner of my bedroom, in the doorway, in my closet, at the foot of my bed, leaning over me as I lay there, sitting next to me as I toss and turn in desperation for sleep. Not even modern medicine is helping my sleeplessness now. I took some sleeping pills the other night to fall asleep at a decent time, but sleep never came. I tossed and turned until five in the morning like I always do; I just felt more tired than I usually do as I tossed and turned.

Last night was the same. I was up until four when I finally nodded off—all too aware of the demon in my doorway.