All the Ways

When I was at my lowest,

I envisioned all the ways I could, I would, take my own life.

I obviously didn't,

but I still imagined them.

What would be the quickest?

The least painful?

A gun I didn't own, that I could quickly get from Wal-Mart.

A car accident.

Letting my car run in the garage.

Drowning.

Pills.

Praying to God to take me in my sleep because I'm a coward.

“God, if this is it? TAKE. ME. OUT.” True prayer. 

Or maybe I wasn't a coward.

Maybe I knew that wasn't what I wanted.

Or maybe I did and just wanted a divine intervention;

for God to exist--to prove, to show himself real by taking me, by answering my prayer.

Maybe I'd leave a note.

Maybe none.

Maybe I'd take my dog with me.

Maybe not.

Maybe I'd grasp something symbolic in my final moments.

Maybe not.

Is there a right way to kill yourself?

And when I brought such images to my mind,

I would cry even more,

sleep even less.

Wonder who even cared, who even loved me.

No one was reaching out to me, after all.

Fuck all the people who'd said they were really my friends, is how I felt, what I thought.

The loneliest place on earth? Thoughts of cessation while being alone.

I remember once my preacher father telling me how he'd read many suicide notes through the years and they all have a combination of this wildness and disconnectedness to them.

He told me he'd read ONE in his 65 some years of living that was from a person who didn't write that way.

One that was cohesive, made sense, had sound reasoning.

One.

I could write that way, I thought.

Who is the judge of our writing?

Only the living.

I tried to imagine my own funeral and how others would react or act at it.

Do we get to see our own funeral?

I've always believed so because most movies and books depict it that way,

but pragmatism and reality resounds: that's an unreal thought.

When you're dead, you're dead.

Right?

My imagination was so damaged by depression at the time that I couldn't even conjure up in my mind what that day might look like.

I couldn't capture the possible feelings of others.

So far removed to even imagine empathy, pain, suffering, sadness.

How many things within me were crushed? Destroyed?

And this is the "darkest night of the soul" the sages speak of.

This is the "so far gone" that many find themselves in,

and in disbelief of the other cliche--seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

A depressed person doesn't need cliches.

A depressed person needs anything that gives hope.

And I was hanging on to any ounce of hope I could muster.

Because everything was so, so awry.

All these ways I imagined a death,

I imagined my death,

yet all of the ways a person can come back to themselves was also simultaneously happening.

I was trying.

I was mending.

Being restored.

I wondered how a live person and a person who was once so full of life could feel so dead,

but I was coming alive again--a seed buried through the most stark and bitter Winter.

Waiting on Spring like a hibernating, unassuming, unknowing creature.

Unaware of my healing, yet somehow longing for it.

A longing that existed, yes, but I'd yet to believe in.

But even the dead can, and will, come back to life--

more alive,

more vibrant,

more grateful,

more compassionate,

more confident,

more loving,

happier,

kinder,

incredibly stronger,

somewhat different,

and better.

And here I am,

all of those things and more.

Don't believe me?

Let me in or get close again,

and I'll show you all the ways.