The first time I listened to Sonic Youth, I was sitting behind a big warehouse in front of a railway. It was the midnight of the last night of July. As Kim Gordon told me to “come on down to the store” over a steady, discordant guitar riff, I told myself to jump in front of the next train that would pass. This was a nightly routine of mine. I never ended up doing it.
The rails are the property of the MTA, the Metropolitan Transport Authority. You legally cannot walk on them, or walk too close to them. This never stopped me. The fear of getting hit by a train eventually disappears. I’d wave to conductors. They’d wave back, or they’d turn their face and leer at me. (My friend and I, that same summer, had the braindead idea of walking to the next station via the train tracks. We were met by a cop. Him and I got off with just a warning—thank God. I became aware that if you were a bored and mildly rebellious teenager living near the Hudson, this was the thing to do.)
There was a carcass of a deer that had been positioned on a concrete block next to these rails. Many animals died here. She had been decomposing since March. I took pictures. Even when the carcass was fresh, the sight somehow wasn't grotesque in the slightest. It was interesting. Her leg had been ripped off. Peach-colored tissue revealed itself around her wounds, opening her body to the things that would strip her of her flesh and leave her the desiccated mound that I’d find upon returning to New York, months later.
There was a study done on the reactions people have when they see the body of their deceased loved ones. Before the stages of putrefaction and before the work performed by morticians to hide these stages of putrefaction, they still seem almost living. Those who are more overtly spiritual treat them as such. Spouses ask their partners about how they feel. Mothers sing for their children. They lie silent, but their loved ones trust that they hear. Ten or so days later, their life finally looks as if it has been emptied from its vessel. The body’s appearance has changed, sunken and stiff. It is just a body. Nobody sings.
Being in my hometown makes me feel contempt. I know the riverbank and the railroad in intimate detail. I have trespassed everywhere, avoiding the gaze of my fellow loiterers in the rare times that I’m not alone. The same cannot be said about the rest of this place. I don’t associate with the people who I used to go to school with. They certainly wouldn’t recognize me. I haven’t spent any time here for years. I understand that this town would remain unchanged if I were to die.
Last year, I laid down on a large, heavy board that had been tethered to a tree and made smooth by the currents of the Hudson. I looked up at the shadows of branches, and at the foliage that extended from them that blocked the newly-visible moon. I was listening to the ambient techno group B12, from an album of theirs called Electro-Soma. Like all good techno, it makes you feel that you are lightyears away from your actual location, away from your body itself. My upbringing tethers me to this town. My body tethers me to myself, despite my efforts to destroy it. I didn’t want to be dead, lying on the board, as much as I wanted to be very, very far away. There are no stars where I live.
My daze is interrupted by the chatter of two girls. In the dim moonlight, I vaguely recognize one from when I was younger. They’re playing something. Some light indie pop or whatever. It interacts poorly with the stripped-down, floating sounds of B12. I decide to make myself known. As they cross a stream, careful to avoid slipping on polished rocks covered with the slippery, treacherous scum of the Hudson, I tell them that it’s much easier to cross if they just walk by the train tracks. They say that they’d never want to do that. That’s fair. They don’t recognize me.
I sometimes talk to a guy who lives here. He’s eccentric, an electronics whiz kid, a year older than me. He has a pile of bones next to these rails. It’s a collection scavenged from animals who have died by the tracks, bleached white, brittle, layers stripping off of them like bark on a tree. I’m listening to Kissability now. Kim Gordon tells me to kiss her. I imagine that I am. I imagine that I’m not here, I’m not squatting behind a warehouse, next to a dumpster, chips of damp asphalt grating against my skin. I imagine that I live in a different world where I’ve never wanted to kill myself, where I’ve never wanted anybody else to feel miserable like me, where I don’t scare my friends and frustrate my parents with the shit I pull. I imagine how my skull would look in a pile of bones.
I found myself researching suicide, especially death on railways. It became a sort of obsession. Perhaps it was a way of living (dying?) vicariously alongside the faceless, nameless victims who were case studies after their death. Entire people. It didn’t occur to me then, but now I feel some sort of guilt for this habit of mine. These people were defined by how they died. These people, despite their apparent misery, were full individuals, but I couldn’t fathom them as such. Posthumously, they would not be recognized by their name or by their actions while living. They were named things such as “Agonal sequences in a filmed suicidal hanging,” “A filmed hanging without decerebrate and decorticate rigidity,” “An unusual case of railway suicide.”
I still remember one title in particular. It was a case study on a 56-year-old man who had been cleaved in two on electrified rails, published in the International Journal of Legal Medicine. It was titled “Just another railway fatality.” Just another railway fatality. Just another one. Reading it, I slowly realized that I wanted to live.