Quietly Exiting the Stage
So Michael was finally going to do it – he was finally going
to end his life. And all that. He was sure. This was it. He was absolutely
sure. He’d be stupid not to, really. That was the thing: as much as he could
appreciate why living had the potential to be really fucking good and beautiful
and all the rest of it, and while he did love nature and his mum and ice-cream and
the films of the Coen brothers and the book Infinite
Jest, and while he had a really good friend called Peter, while these were
all the pros, he had also spent most of his life desperately unhappy, and it
wasn’t going to get any better, and he was sick of it – he was sick of being
tormented by anxiety and dread and paranoia, sick of being in a near permanent
state of blackest despair. Plus David Foster Wallace himself committed suicide
and he was really smart and clever and had good ideas, so how could it be
irrational? But he didn’t need other people to verify his rationality anyway – that
was dumb. That was irrational. Which was funny. Anyway the thing was that he
didn’t even know why he was still weighing up the pros and cons of life vs
death; he had been trying to systematically figure that out for the last year
or so, and, as difficult as it was because his mind was pretty fucking
recalcitrant – which was often something that made him wild with rage and then
despair and sometimes made him want to bash his head against the wall, but only
really in an abstract way – he was now pretty much adamant that death was the
way more rational option.
Which was why he was in the study of the
family home, sat on the swivel chair, gripping a pen, staring at a blank sheet
of lined paper in a plain A4 notebook, and thinking about what to write in his
suicide note. He was also thinking about a lot of other things, such as the
fact that he had only found this notebook just minutes before, in the study’s old,
dark-wood cupboard. Like with most sights he’d seen in the last week – a week whose
entirety was spent in the knowledge that he would kill himself today (he had
set the date for his own demise precisely one week before it would occur
because he thought it would be, like, most rational to be brutally practical
and matter-of-fact about his suicide) – he had made a real effort to sort of
appreciate the cupboard. As he stared at it closely and inhaled its musky
smell, he had even whispered to himself the words, ‘The last time I will see
this old, beautiful cupboard’, which imbued the moment with a great Hollywood
poignancy and gravitas. Of course, he had also whispered that phrase (except with
different words after “this”, based on what he was looking at) for all the
other sights he had made an effort to appreciate that week, and the practice
had been tinged with irony even when he first did it, about his bed (which he
was sitting on at that time) because, you know, it was pathetically cliché and
lame, and it was also untrue that it would be “the last time” in the case of
the bed, plus the whole ritual devolved into facetiousness immediately anyway,
because after saying it was “The last time [he would see] the bed”, he started
saying the phrase about, like, everything around him that his eyes fixated on, including
his own body parts: “The last time I will see my leg, the last time I will see
that hair on my leg, the last time I will see my hamstring wobbling, the last
time I will see the reflection of my face in the window.” This ridiculousness was
somewhat amusing to him at the time and also quickly meant the whole ritual had
turned into a full-blown joke, although not a really funny joke; he had soon
stopped chuckling after he said the phrase because that had become contrived-seeming
and weird. But after he said it for the last time, with regards to that
cupboard (he knew it was the last time because after he did finish staring
deeply into the grains of the cupboard’s wood and all the rest of it, he had
sort of made a note-to-self in his head that it would definitely be the last
time, he had emphasised internally that it would be the last time, which was also rather Hollywood and thus which he
also kind of phrased ironically in his brain) he sort of wistfully blew some
air out of his nose and smiled slightly.
Another thing he was thinking
about was the fact that, at frequent points throughout the entire past week, he
had imagined himself being watched and judged by someone, often a specific
person – like his mum or dad or his now distant friend Lucy or Peter – or he
had imagined being filmed, both things which very often happened when he was alone
generally: a weird quirk of his mind which pretty much informed most of his
solitary behaviour, and which, when analysed, sometimes made him want to do the
same abstract head-against-wall bashing mentioned previously.
Of course, he didn’t really know
why he was thinking about any of this stuff, because, really, he was writing a
suicide note and he should have been concentrating on that. Not that that was
easy, because how the hell was he meant to start? Should he try to make it a
pithy heartfelt statement to his parents just explaining that he was committing
suicide, or should it be some elaborate essay that was really well written and
impressive and which, like, explained everything – explained pretty much all
the stuff his parents didn’t know about him and pretty much why he was committing
suicide and apologised for hurting them, and then maybe got all philosophical
on the nature of suicide and its popular representation, as well as depression,
and the medicalisation of depression, and then maybe had some stuff about
mortality in general and the afterlife, like basically a really good,
sophisticated meditation on matters of life and death? But surely that was just
incredibly pretentious and he was just doing it to show off and it was also
really narcissistic, plus he was going to die soon anyway so what the hell did
it matter? But maybe that was the wrong
attitude, because he should care about this sort of thing, because he wasn’t
just a dumb nihilist or whatever, he wasn’t just some emo or whatever; he
actually wasn’t just ending his life for nothing, he still thought there was
value in the world and stuff.
Eventually, Michael decided that
he was just going to start and carefully write whatever came to his mind.
Dear mum and dad and
whoever else reads this,
I know it’s pretty
cliché to write a suicide note, and pretty lame to begin your suicide note by
pointing out how cliché that is, but I guess there are some things that I’d
like to tell you before I hang myself, which I’m about to do. […]
When he was on his 12th page, after a few hours
solid writing, Michael’s dad walked in the front door and Michael aborted the
suicide plan.
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