Chickens you know I been dealing with suicidal thoughts since I been a wee lad, and I been dodgin those uppercuts so hard my neck hurts. I gotta lot of tricks now, from mantras and prayers to full blown crazy person magic spells. You aint keep yourself alive from it for over twenty years without Learning, but recently I done found a good trick that keeps working.
When that thought stabs me and makes me say “I want to die” I counter it on its own stupid terms. I say “I don’t wanna die, I wanna have sex and play warhammer”. And though those aren’t the best and first things in my life, it works as a little circuit breaker. These thoughts are stupid, because you don’t wanna die. You want to have fun and stop hurting, and one usually leads to the other.
Life is full of little good shit I wanna do. And though it’s also full of big good shit, sometimes its hard to see cos it’s so large. Sometimes you just need breadcrumbs to lead you home.
Here some microfiction about that. Sorry I ain’t post last week man have I got Excuses.
Givin’ Up
Another man approached as he stood by the railing of the Story Bridge, hands resting flat, doing the maths on the distance to the asphalt and contemplating if he should dive headfirst for a sure exit, or if it mattered. Not holding back tears because he already felt dead. Despair replacing the water in his cells, fingernails and hair already grown out like a corpse.
He’d practiced for this, the speech he’d give. That there was nothing that man could say, because all the bonds he’d ever had to this earth had been broken, all the strings holding him down had long been untied. Faith and trust and promise were all just vibrations in the air, empty because there was nothing to fill. He’d searched long and far for home and love, but they’d never been there in the first place. Just little drips, sporadic like Chinese water torture.
He was sure now. God was dead in heaven and man was on his own. With no hell to avoid and no paradise to strive for, what was holding him back? What kept him from returning to the primordial soup of cells and atoms and elements?
He’d ask what the point was, but he was already sure. There had never been any. Just another empty word in a haze of gas. It had never mattered, and this grief is what he should have been feeling all along.
The man tapped his shoulder, and he spun, ready to unload his grief and rage. To bring the universe down with him. “Hey mate,” the man said, brow furrowing in an instant. “You know you’re standing on 50 bucks?”
He looked down, under his worn boot, one that had been laced to his aching foot for too many miles, yellow plastic peeked out next to the cigarette butts and blackened gum. A grin pulled his cheek like a fishhook pulled by a newborn.
“Ah, thanks mate. Yeah, that’s mine.”
He stooped and slid it into his pocket, looked up, then walked to the nearest pub. He’d wait there until this little gift from the universe ran out. If it ever did.
Skydekkerix 