A note on suicide

To whom it may concern,

It will be no shock to those reading these words that I have a preoccupation with suicide. You might say "unhealthy" preoccupation, but that seems redundant; even mayonnaise is more healthful than the deliberate termination of one's own life. But I feel that I should affirm for the record, that despite the title of this weblog, I do not envision myself strategically degrading like the ever-scraped groove on a record, or a length of vermiculate nautical rope chafing against a rusted cleat, or a sad bug-chasing homosexual, or a monkey that can smoke 37 cigarettes at once.

For I fear the future more than I fear death. When I consider wrinkles sprawling across my skin, or my memories eroding like yellowing paper, I become conscious of my breath and I look at my hands and I plunge into a coffin-sized tank of anxiety. And then my hands fold into desperate fists, and a thought materializes in my brain: "you must escape."

But it won't be by drinking a thousand carefully-measured droplets of poison night-after-night, or by methodically dragging a cheese grater against my soul, or by standing unclothed in the daylight and letting my skin cook and eyes twist themselves shut under the oppressive sun. I will not simply hate, wait, and fulminate as the train clacks towards the rail's end.

I can't swim, so I will die in the ocean.

The ocean is another planet. Not just "more" than our terrestrial domain, but truly beyond it. It is filled with more life and wonder and complexity than the pathetic sliver of Earth on which slugs and birds and cigarette smoking monkeys play. I think it's fitting that I perish at the horizon of a new frontier. Should there be an afterlife (chortle), my ghost can haunt the dark and undulating expanse of the briny deep. After all, eternity will go by faster in new surroundings. Hell, I might even learn something.

To be exact: with a single cinderblock tied to my feet, I will struggle in the frigid waves as far from shore as I can get. This struggle will no doubt be my life's hardest. My thrashing arms and legs will burn and weaken against the seemingly thickening water. As the rope pinches my ankle, my lips will kiss the surface of the water from below and suck madly at the disappearing air. My lungs and body will fill with the ocean and I will fall. I will become the agent of my destruction. And then I will sleep.

And so it is you who must live out the slow motion of suicide. You, dear readers, will carry the weights as yet untied to the ankles of corpses loitering on the ocean floor, or other final destinations. You must plod through the molecular dance, and tell those who knew me about my demise and react sensibly to their crumbling faces. If you meet someone who claims to love me, remind them that just as one cannot hold a shadow —an image of a thing— that one cannot love a suicide either. Their lives are shadows too.

Calm down: I'm not done yet. I can wait a lifetime for that. But I feel compelled to declare that unlike the the tedious and plodding ascent of these words on your computer screen, my resignation from these posts will be sudden and decisive. Like two fingers pressing on a flush handle, or the photograph that makes you infamous, or the moment just after you plant an ill-advised kiss on her mouth; never to be the same, never to be undone.

Respectfully yours,

Harvey