Five or six years ago my mom told me a dream she'd had. She said me and her had been alone in a car away from civilization and I'd crapped myself (har har) and thrown a tantrum. At the time I must've been around twelve. The dream was a nightmare and she was very scared.
My mother told me about this dream and elaborated on how helpless I seemed to be in daily life. I already knew I was helpless, but maybe this was the first time the sentiment was relayed in such an evocative manner. I don't think I did anything about it at the time. I continued bawling my eyes out every day. I continued cutting. I continued drafting childish suicide notes and stealing my phone from my parents' room at the middle of the night. I continued telling too many things to people who I didn't know. I don't think I was going to school anymore.
The first suicidal thought in your life is like a revelation. The lightbulb turned on when I must've been around ten or eleven. It probably comes later for most people. I didn't have the words for it, but I implicitly understood suicide as the most poignant symbol of suffering. Angst codified. Of course suicide isn't alone in its symbolism - if you're my age and decently aware, you know the other signs we're primed to look for: cutting yourself, starving yourself, hiding yourself, using too many drugs, eating too much, sleeping too much, yak, yak, yak. It doesn't matter. It's all interpreted as the same thing. To the chronically mentally ill, it's the same habit. You can pick your favorites before they, too, get boring to you. Until it becomes the baseline you resign yourself to before anything else.
Anyway, middle schoolers are naïve. To my eleven-year-old self, suicide was the forbidden fruit that seemed to offer me the opportunity to be taken seriously. This is how grown-ups dealt with their sadness. This was now my problem. This was the thing to focus on. Lonely for my whole life, I no longer merely had to chalk it up to being weird or isolated or just a latchkey kid. The problem was suicide. So I tried to kill myself. And I kept doing it. And it obviously didn't work, but like many others, I went at it for years.
Each person passing by makes me feel dumber and dumber. I feel like a central tenet of wanting to kill yourself is the assumption that nobody has felt as bad as you and lived. Suicide - the end of my own life - is a uniquely selfish decision. It has the unfortunate designation of being the singular most drastic thing I could do. I inevitably view myself in third person when I think about it. He could drown himself in the reservoir. He could go back home and inject an air bubble into his veins. He could lie down on the highway. I weigh the pros and cons like I'm buying a product. What gives him the most mileage, the most efficiency, the least pain? What variables can we control?
The sounds of the woods surround me while I sit with my knees to my chest. Here's when the aerial footage comes in. Here's the soundtrack we'd find appropriate. Here's the cutscene: He's bloated, floating on the water like Ophelia. He's in a hospital bed, ready to be a vegetable for the rest of his life. He's hanging from a tree. Or, most likely, he goes back home and he reassures everyone that no, he won't kill himself, he won't do anything stupid, he's sorry he worried you. Another drop in the bucket of parasuicide. I am well-rehearsed.