If it wasn’t for ceramic plumbing fixtures and my pesky fear of drowning, this could have been my eulogy…
 
June 8, 2002. It was the first time (in a long time) I had thought about killing myself. I mean, I had thought about it before, but not like this. This was visualizing…I imagined myself doing it. It was almost like a dream, but just a little too real. I could see myself committed to the act; It was like a movie or even better-a goddamn ABC After-school special. I had it all planned out (as if it takes some extent of knowledge to kill oneself): I watched myself go into the bathroom and start filling the tub with water just hot enough to scald; just the right temperature to barely boil the skin. Then I went into the kitchen to find a steak knife in the lovely wooden station that is so fashionable these days. I could see myself going back into the now sauna—like lavatory, taking the serrated blade, and stabbing my forearm – as with the nails of crucifixion, the thorn of MY martyrdom; slicing my arm from elbow to wrist – as though gutting a rainbow trout – and waving it like a damned parade float beauty queen. I went to sit in my watery tomb and wait until my strength gave out and I collapse into my little pale-red melting pot, where all my problems would come together to yield one final and tasty stewed solution—Death is the answer to Life, or at least, to my life.
 
…And my roommate would come home from her shitty job at the Spag (what the dedicated employees have so affectionately christened the Old Spaghetti Factory) in her baby blue shirt and pleated cotton-blend khakis, reeking of pasta and garlic, and stroll past my bathroom. She would go into her chambers and, consequently, take a shower herself and settle in, completely oblivious to the obviously monumental tragedy lurking only a few yards away. Eventually, though, she would have to wonder where I am and come looking – either that or she would run out of hot water…or the smell would get to her – and she’d come looking and she’d find the body, now wrinkled from soaking up as much of the fatal bath as a blood-let corpse can hold. …And she would scream from shock and cry from confusion and deny from despair, but inevitably sigh from sympathy and understanding.
 
That was all I had wanted anyway…at least that’s what I thought at the time.
 
I was at an extremely low point in my life – I suppose I’m still there as I write this, and my computer has failed me three times already this morning, causing me to question why I am even attempting this, and if it’s really worth it at all. We had just moved into this beautiful apartment in lovely Lynnwood, Washington – a smug suburban metropolis in about an hour or two south of the Canadian border – roughly two months ago, but at the cost of the greatest job I’ve ever had and at the cost of my liberties. Income reduction causes more than affluent poverty. I had just fallen out of three horrible endings to three extremely different relationships all within the past nine months. I had no money, no car, no future, and least of all no hope. It was freshman year of college all over again….
 
Still, I digress, I was unemployed and spent the greater part of my days in a luxury resort that only slightly resembled prison. My roommate had decided to get digital cable, so all I did pretty much was eat, sleep, and veg-out. Just like prison-but not the one in my head, the one from which there was no escape and apparently no chance for parole. I did have time to read, but I suppose “Prozac Nation” probably isn’t as uplifting as say, a fucking comic book, but at least it gave me the courage and understanding to identify my problems and put them down.
 
But back to the suicide.
 
Two days later, I can’t sleep. I’m up all night, waiting for a phone call from Allison (one of the three relationships), but she hasn’t called for three days, and every time I see her she seems more pissed than the day before. She’s the only person who can understand my situation, as she daily trudges through the routine of her existence with the outward physical scars that I can only imagine on my forearm, or at least know line my weary soul. I want someone to talk to but all I have is this damned depressing book, and I’m reading it, and it’s like Wurtzel is having a fucking conversation with me. It’s working…I’m writing aren’t I. So I decide, why don’t I go take a bath…you know, a real one, with clean water, and no puncture or slice wounds. Something to relax the mind and body and spirit. Since I can’t sleep, I figure it can’t hurt, I should probably try to get some sleep…even if it is diurnally. So I get in the bath and all I really want to do is submerge myself, just get into the water-after all, I am from Hawaii, and I haven’t taken a vacation in a long, long time – but I can’t. I get as far as penetrating the surface with the back of my head and then the thought crosses my mind that “if I put my face into this water I’m going to inhale, and I’m going to love it.” I got the hell out of that fucking bathroom.
 
But, I’m still trying to get out of the bath.