Get control of yourself, Corey!
He rubbed his head, then went to the bathroom, took a shower, tugged on some clothes. He checked his e-mail just to do something normal, to think something normal, to try putting things back into perspective again.
But all the while, it was as if this idea of suicide had lodged in his brain and grown roots. It seemed like a temptation that he could think of fewer and fewer reasons to resist, something he didn’t simply want to avoid, but something he consciously wanted to do.
A few years ago his psychiatrist had told him that depression was anger turned inward, but Corey knew that wasn’t right. Anger is a symptom of depression, not its cause. Anyone who’s dealt with depression can tell you that.
Depression begins with a small disappointment and spirals downward, inward, out of control, like a blackness circling in on itself, pulling in everything else around it, sucking it all in, funneling it out of sight.
Sometimes anger is your only ally, because it gives you something to feel when the rest of your life turns numb. It gives you something to fight against when you feel like giving up. More often than not, it’s when the anger dissipates, not when it arrives, that you’re in trouble.
And right now, Corey was not feeling angry, but resolute.
It’s just the depression. Fight against it.
No, you’ll lose. It runs in the family, Corey.
Like mother, like son.
Though she’d been dead nearly three decades, he could still remember the desperation he felt whenever his dad would leave on his truck routes, still hear the sound of his mother’s sharp words and the smack of her slapping the face of his older sister, still see her shuffling from the couch to the kitchen to get to a bottle. “Escape in a liquid dream,” she called it.
Often she would lock herself in her bedroom. He could hear her crying in there, sometimes for hours. He would knock on the door and call to her, “Mommy, don’t cry. It’s okay.” He was a seven-year-old, too little to know he was doing no good.
Though his older sister tried to reassure him and told him everything was going to be okay, in the end she’d been wrong. His mother didn’t find escape in a liquid dream. The nightmares that’d haunted her for so long won on the day she swallowed that handful of pills.
Corey felt his heart race.
An inexplicable sense of urgency swept over him.
You could get a gun like you were going to use in high school. Or use pills like Mom. Or jump from a bridge or a railroad trestle. A cliff. There are plenty of—
Another voice inside of him shouted, Stop it!
Drowning? Tying a weight to your feet and jumping into Allatoona Lake? Suffocation? A plastic bag over your head?
He considered those last two options for a moment but realized that to him, the thought of drowning or suffocating was simply too disturbing.
A blade, yes.
A knife really was the best choice.
But not slitting an artery. Something more honorable.
He could stab it into his abdomen — yes, yes — lean forward onto the blade like samurais did long ago. But he would need to make sure the blade was long enough to angle up into his heart. He didn’t know much about stab wounds, but he’d heard enough to know that if he ended up stabbing himself just in the abdomen, it would take him a long time to die. And it would not be a pleasant death at all. He would make sure that he didn’t—
Why? Why are you even thinking this?!
Because you’re a corpse in the making, Corey. Just like everyone. But you have control over the moment when you reach your destiny. And unlike most people, you have the courage to make it happen today. Right here. Right now.
How do people live with the knowledge that they’ll be gone so soon? How do they go about their daily lives, watch their movies, sip their cappuccinos, birth their babies, and go to school or work or church with the knowledge that they might stop breathing any second?
Denial.
Constant denial.
It’s the only way.
Unless there’s something better waiting for you after death, Corey.
Yes, unless.
He returned to the kitchen, went to the knife block, removed the longest one, and walked to the living room.
Not all of us succeed in this life, but there’s one thing everyone who’s ever been born has succeeded at — dying. And the world simply twirls on, the universe forgetting we were ever here.
Corey went to the living room, where he could have a view of the forest outside, the woods opening wide and full in the spring. There’s nothing like spring in Atlanta.
He would die looking at the blossoming trees.
With each moment the question of why he was doing this felt less and less pertinent, like a blurry memory someone he used to be was having.
Free will.
Free to live, to choose.
Free to die, if we desire it.
Kneeling, he drew his shirt up and positioned the tip of the blade against his stomach just below the sternum.
Like mother, like son.
Get this right. You need to get this right or it’s going to be a long and messy, messy death.
When the decision finally came, it was almost a reassurance that finally, now, things could move on, just as they were meant to, a man passing away into his destiny in the grave.
He let out a deep breath to relax the muscles in his abdomen so the blade would slide in easier, then he tightened his grip on the knife’s handle so it would go in at the proper angle.
Corey closed his eyes.
And with a swift, smooth motion he drove the blade high into his abdomen aimed at his heart as he leaned forward and then used the force of impact with the floor to bury the knife in up to the handle.
He fell limply to the side.
There was less pain than he expected.
At first.
But based on the position of the handle he guessed the tip had found its mark.
The pain began as a tight circle of warmth unfurling through him, turning hotter and brighter with every passing second until it felt like a strange companion, as if it were something he’d always had close by, but had only now, in this moment, begun to experience fully.
He wasn’t certain he’d hit his heart, but it must have been close, because with each heartbeat, the handle quivered slightly, as if it were choreographed to do so, somehow programmed to move in sync with the arrival of his death.
That’s when the pain began convulsing through him, and that’s when the questions came.
He wondered if hell was real, if that’s where he would go for doing this, for taking his own life — for this self-murder — or if heaven awaited him, if he’d ever done enough to deserve it.
A preacher’s words came to him from a sermon he’d heard on the radio one time while driving through central Georgia: “It’s not about what you have done for God, brothers and sisters, but about what God has done for you. Amen?”
So, had he believed in that enough to receive it?
Your mother — is she in heaven? Did she go to hell for the things she did to her children on those days when she’d had too much to drink? Will you see her again when you die?
Just seconds after he thought that, he heard the front door click open.
Confused, Corey turned his head toward the hallway, but with no clear view to the front of the house, he saw nothing.