I am a presence without a body, a mind without thoughts.
I still want to die.
The bruises on my arms are slowly fading, leaving the marks of a drug addict where I-Vs were embedded into my skin and blood was removed from sustaining life.
These are the only things I�m certain I know.
** ** ** **
I have been told that I�ve survived a suicide attempt. I have been told that time will take away the sadness, the worthlessness, the motives behind wanting to die. I have been told that others understand what I�m going through. I have been told not to let myself worry about anything but getting better. I have been told to live.
And like a people-pleaser, a do-gooder, a peacekeeper, I sit here not dying but somewhere between death and life. I sit here still in incredible pain�pain that wrenches my stomach violently with every other breath, though I am in the best physical health I�ve been in since childhood but the years have caught up with my mind. I sit here not able to remember moments ago: walking from one room to the next and leaving behind purpose. I sit here afraid to leave the apartment. I sit here preparing myself for Monday morning when I�ll have to get up and walk to the subway and to work and to home again. Preparing myself as if I�m going to war. I sit here waiting to be afraid of silence again instead of desiring more and more of it until it obliterates me and all the sounds I�ve ever come to recognize as life.
I still want to die, though I�ve promised a hand full of people�psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, counselors, doctors, friends�that I won�t attempt suicide again, and I answer, �better,� when they ask me how I feel: that is the only reason I am home instead of in the hospital, but I�d go back if I thought it would be easier, though even there I felt the same.
But there, when the others said they understood what I�m going through, I believed them. We sat around the tables not comparing pain but living through it, because we live through it everyday. We walked and talked and walked in silence and all the time there was silence�our own minds in our own realities touching each other only because we were in the same ward at the same time, because all of us had died once or twice or a hundred times, and we all understood that living isn�t the hardest but living after death is a joke that we have to laugh at it together or be engulfed by our own treacherous battlefields.
But here there is no one laughing with me because no one understands. I have been told that I survived suicide. I have been told to walk into an emergency room and commit myself if I feel unsafe in my own mind. I have been told not to be afraid. I have been told to survive.
But this is to Ethan and Betsie and Corey and Lani who celebrated with me when they heard that I was leaving. This is for them who understood that I could come back tomorrow or the next day, because I was leaving more alone than when I came in. This is to them who toasted Ginger Ale to my un-medicated release and taught me what medications not to let my doctor give me without proving to me I needed them. This is to them: the most intelligent, non-judging people I will ever meet between death and life. This is to them who laugh at the world because what they see is so much more than what anyone without death will ever know, and we are the survivors, though it has nothing to do with suicide.