Suicide Solution

You're thinking about it again. I wouldn't be here if you weren't. When you drift to thoughts of suicide at night, you provide a gateway for me to rise to the surface.

I've seen many who are obsessed, and when you're not thinking about ending your life, I get to visit their minds. However, you are truly one fascinating creature. No one knows it but me. You entertain some insanely beautiful thoughts for a few moments during the day. At midnight, your insomniac streak kicks in, and then you're stuck on long thought tangents of when, how, and where you'd like to take your own life. Most people go for easy, painless deaths, but you're different.

You've had some original concoctions, let me tell you. You moved past knives, sharp objects, firearms, and medication relatively quickly. You thought about plastering your brains against the basement wall downstairs with a twelve gauge once or twice. I recall flashes of deliberate cyanide poisoning and overdoses of painkillers.

Your favorite, though, is a free fall over that cliff to the north of town. You think about your body breaking in one terrible second on the jutting spires of rocks in the sea foam. You wonder if you would perish upon impact, or if you would bounce and sink in to the salt bath. You like the thought of open wounds, of impaling yourself and instantly filling your body with the swell of the ocean. You want to be tossed about in the waves, crashed against the rock wall like a ping pong ball until you finally expire.

These are the opportunities I relish and look forward to.

You're half aware of who I am at night when you lay there in quiet desperation. Your smile at work, around your dog and spouse, at the line in Subway for your five dollar footlong at lunch time ---- it's a hideously perfect facade. I have to commend you on building up the image of a normal American citizen. Your guise is nearly as strong as my own.

Back in the day, you thought about it every now and then, but lately, it's been an exquisite constant. The more you consider offing yourself, the more you invite me along for the ride. I took your mental hand from the first step down the road of dark thoughts, of wiping your own existence off the face of the earth. The first time you seriously considered it, I was born.

I remember it perfectly. It was the time when you were seven, and you tripped in the garage and knocked your father's Harley Davidson crashing to the cement floor. He'd been hitting his Sunday afternoon portion of Wild Turkey surprise after you'd come in from church, waiting on your mother to cook. He was furious with you and gave you a nice big wallop that you told your teacher was a bruise from a rogue baseball pitch. He wiped out a paycheck to pay for the damage and you went without lunch money for a month.

You've never played baseball in your life, you sneaky chameleon. I know better.

Don't ask me what I am. I'm not quite sure. Maybe I'm just a voice that people hear in their heads. Perhaps you are mentally ill, and I am you, but also not you. The most interesting notion is that I am some dark force and malevolent spirit, but I'm not prone to flattery. I am a force, a desire ---- a means to a permanent end. Nothing more.

You've never had the balls to go through with it, and I don't think you ever will. Be honest. You've always dubbed it "the easy way out," or you would have tried it out by now. The truth is, you don't have the gumption, and most other people don't either. You say it's a cowardly gesture, a cop out from the hardships of real life ---- but that's your excuse.

At one time or another, we all hit what we think is rock bottom. Some of us take a step back from the edge after seeing how steep the drop is, and we're ashamed for even considering a fatal leap. In this case, we are normal.

Some of us open a figurative parachute in mid air and realize how close we really are to death, and it changes our lives completely, mostly for the better. These people are the wrist-slashers and the failures who aren't even good enough to off themselves, and they fail miserably at everything they do. Believe it or not, they end up as stronger people than most after the ordeal ---- if they survive it.

Some of us hit terminal velocity when we go over the edge, and we splatter with collateral impact on the ground, destroying not only our own lives, but the lives of fellow loved ones and friends in the process. These people care for nothing in life but themselves. As soon as they hate the person they have become, they have nothing left. Their lives combust in one violent moment and their suicide impacts the world around them.

But you're none of those, are you? Mostly, you're a slug who avoids confrontation, but at least you're creative.

Sometimes, I get a pleasant surprise, and I get the chance to spring up during random times of the day ---- like when your boss calls you in to her office for an hour of adultery. Considering how much weight she's gained, I can't say I blame you for NOT wanting to have sex at work, but you're stuck with the pay raise at a job you can never leave. You can't back out on your little arrangement because you don't want her to leave a quick but oh-so-tantalizing voicemail for your wife, loaded with all the juicy details of your nine month fling, I have a feeling your significant other won't appreciate her new Lexus as much as she did when you pulled it up in the driveway, fresh off a Monday to Friday fuck spree. She still thinks you got promoted, because you're a clever manipulator of smoke and mirrors.

I won't tell anyone what a despicable person you are. You're standing there every day from three to four, thrusting in to that squealing porker on a groaning desk, wanting to send a nine millimeter slug straight through your temple the entire time.

This is where we digress. I don't see how you can endure it. When your neighbor sneaks in to your back yard at night and jerks off to your daughter through her bedroom window, you're too lazy to do anything about it because he's two hundred and seventy pounds and you're just a slimcake coward. You're too afraid to confront a potential sex offender in your neighborhood, but not because you don't care about your teenager. You really are just that lazy. It's astonishing.

The truth is, none of this is new information to you. You hear the same voice, the same thoughts, every single night. I'm always lingering in the grey area, waiting for you to make a move, but you don't. You're like a month old pickle that's hardened and stuck to the glass window of a diner. Instead of slowly sliding down to the floor, however, you just cling to the glass and let the sun shrivel you up in to an inedible scrap of decay.

This is the one new thought you'll have all night. In fact, it's the first new thing in this vicious circle that's been circulating through your head for a decade.

I'm tired of all the creative rigs you've set up in your mind. You construct these delusions of suicide grandeur, meticulously crafted and thought out to the point of perfection, and then you just wake up and put on your ruse to the rest of the world the next morning. You throw these great inventions in your head out the window, and I can never save them, because I have no control.

Patience is my greatest of attributes. I've watched and waited, and a week ago, I found out that I was wrong about my role as a spectator in this mess that you call your life. I've gained some measure of power over your mind. I haven't used it when you're awake, or you would notice.

I'm not a helpless observer anymore. When you drove your car to the edge of that cliff last night, you got me incredibly excited. I thought the moment had finally arrived. We were both ready, but then you lied to yourself again.

You backed down for the thousandth time. You're a suicide prude. Always holding back. Giving me self-destructive blue balls.

Tomorrow, your body will be mine. I've had the most perfect set of watercolors to paint the portrait of our death, but never the physical canvas with which to do it.

I'm going to take over while you're fucking your boss. I have a few things to say to her. Something tells me that you won't fight it. You'll drift away and let me take care of everything.

You have way, way too many problems.

Suicide is your ultimate solution for all of them.