Failed Suicide off a Short Building

I tried to kill myself when I was seventeen years old, but I failed. That’s blunt, I’m sorry. Not sure what else there is to say. That’s pretty much the important part. I tried to kill myself when I was seventeen years old but, obviously, I was unsuccessful.

I maintain that I really did try to kill myself, though there are some who don’t believe me. No one has ever accused me of anything less than an honest effort outright to my face, but there are hints. I hate it when people leave hints. It’s so disingenuous. People think no one ever gets the hint no matter how obvious the hint is. I think at least part of this is a result of dishonesty on the other side. When we see a hint, our first impulse is to ignore it. Half so we can pretend the hint was never given to salvage our egos and half to spite the hinter, to deprive them of the satisfaction of knowing that they were crafty and clever and got their point across without the need for confrontation. The fractions might not be exact, but those motivations are always there, I think. I try to avoid this by bringing any conflict that is hinted at subtly to the surface. It does the trick and when I suspect someone is dropping hints, I am rarely wrong. I have never done this when I think that people might be dropping hints about the authenticity of my suicide, though. I don’t know why.

But like I said, there is some controversy about my suicide. Some people believe that I had no intention of killing myself. That the whole thing was just a ploy for attention or pity. That my failure was my greatest success, excuse the self-conscious literary posturing. But like I said, no one has said this, so I guess the only person who I know for sure believes that I had no intention of killing myself is me, even though I do believe that I wanted to kill myself. And not just wanted, because one can want to kill himself and then fake a suicide attempt or whatever I did or didn’t do. But tried to kill myself. I think I’m working on two different planes here and one has no concept of the other. I mean, I know that’s the first thing you learn in Psych 101, but I don’t actually believe in the two planes thing. It sounds simple, like overly simple, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s a bit too complicated to explain how stupid we can be. I think there can’t be more than half a plane running the show, or else we wouldn’t have so much trouble handling things. Psychologists talk about battling forces in the mind, but that has never seen right. I imagine just one force, completely overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. Even if they’re right about all the other stuff like the libido and the death drive and society and its discontents, you think the ego wouldn’t want a little help? You think the libido would want to run the show on its own? No way in hell.

I just can’t get around the strange ways people have of describing the event. I’m not sure if what I did can be described with all of our strange limited little terms and diagnoses. I remember the first time I heard it. I was lying in the hospital bed and I heard some nurses or interns or something talking outside of my room, I heard one of them describe me as a “failed suicide,” the word suicide used as a noun which I’ve always thought is kind of cool. Maybe it was the drugs I may or may not have been on or the fog that may or may not have enveloped my mind at that moment, but I couldn’t comprehend the term “failed suicide” for the life of me. It must, I thought, be an oxymoron or redundant, one or the other, or a redundant oxymoron, which I think is an oxymoron. It’s something, one of those two opposite things that can’t be reconciled with one another. What is a failed suicide? Aren’t all suicides failures? Is a successful suicide any less of a failure than a failed suicide? If anything, it seems to me a success would be a greater failure, unless of course one was trying to fail as it is alleged by none out loud that I was trying to do, in which case the failure—never mind. This isn’t fun anymore.

But it’s made me into a kind of double negative in the eyes of others, I think, except for the ones who think that I didn’t really want to kill myself, to whom I guess I would be a successful failed suicide. Though if you ask me, it takes a special kind of failure to try to not kill oneself. Perhaps that deserves another failure affixed somewhere. Of course, this needs to be distinguished from not trying to kill oneself. What is the default state called? Who has the time to figure all this out?

So you see, I maintain that I did not try to not kill myself that day on top of that short building. Kind of an ingenious idea, though, but I don’t think I would have been capable of coming up with it on my own. I wasn’t exactly in optimal mental condition at the time. I was pretty messed up, obviously. It’s not that I was in despair or anything, it was strange. I wasn’t sad. I had always imagined that people who committed suicide had to be really sad, the kind of people who only stopped crying long enough to tighten the noose. I thought it was or would be a deeply significant thing, where the act was the only thing that I would be able to consider. I thought it would somehow involve a kind of tunnel vision. Like I wouldn’t be able to see or hear or consider anything else, because how else does anyone get it done? How can one think about anything and still go through with it? Any thought of anything else, I imagined—the groceries, the sound of a telephone, anything—would make the act impossible. Only the act could be considered, or else the link would be impossible to sever.

I did think about things, that’s what made it so difficult for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about things. I was kneeling on the roof like a catcher behind home plate and I couldn’t stop thinking. I’ve never done so much thinking in my life and I hope I never have to think so much again, because it’s a stressful, exhausting condition. I expected my last thoughts before the act to center around the people I know. My family and friends. But it wasn’t like that (no thoughts I have had to date have been my last thoughts, obviously, but that’s not what I mean). I thought about other people, the ones who would be around after I did it. Like people walking past at the time. Then I thought about a firefighter. I imagined that after an hour or so there would be a firefighter who would have to scrape me off the pavement with a big spatula. And I chuckled, in spite of myself, looking over that ledge that wasn’t so high after all, contemplating the last thing I would ever do. I chuckled and then I stopped chuckling suddenly and then I threw myself over the edge. I didn’t look. People think I looked. They don’t say this; these are the people whom I suspect of suspecting me. But I didn’t look. I just rolled over the brick lip at the edge of the roof like I was vaulting over the arm on my couch onto the floor and I fell.

I thought about death a lot back then. I still do now, but in different ways. Back then I was an idiot. I romanticized it as I suspect lots of people do when they’re immature and stupid. I didn’t know what form the afterlife would take, but I took for granted that it would exist. I don’t use the word afterlife these days unless it’s specifically to reference my frame of mind back then. It’s an anachronism now. I speak about it the afterlife the same way my parents talk about 45s. With a bit of mocking for show but really boatloads of nostalgia that isn’t hard to notice if you’re listening carefully.

But like I said, I thought about death a lot. I would talk about it with my girlfriend whose name was Terry. She was very fat and I was very thin and we would have gentle encouraging arguments about whether it was worse to be fat or to be thin until we finally hit upon the idea that it was being in general that was the problem. We probably would have killed ourselves together, but we were afraid. Not of death; we were entranced by death. It was simply the things which brought death that were frightening. Between the two of us, we had everything covered. She had heights, pills and chemicals while I covered guns, knives and razors. And most of all there was a deep resentment. We felt that in offing ourselves, we would be doing a world a favor and, having come to hate the world so much, refused to give it the satisfaction. This wasn’t just silliness on our parts, I think. I believe to this day that we really would have been doing the world a favor. We were awful people. What good were we doing the world? We were sapping resources and inconveniencing everyone else. More teenagers should kill themselves. I truly believe this.

Being with her was miserable, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Like I said, being. That was the problem, that was our great revelation. But when we broke up, I realized that the problem had been her all along. Sure, there was a week when the simple fact that I no longer had any girlfriend of any kind was depressing. It was a blow to the ego. Having any kind of relationship, after all, says something about yourself. It gives you a status, an identity. I thought of myself through my relationship with her. Which would cause problems later. But at first, I quickly recovered from this sense of loss, not just of Terry but self. I mean, I don’t want to psychoanalyze and make a fool of myself. But after about a week, I discovered there was nothing missing, really, which struck me as significant.

Then a month later, she called me up and she was angry with me. I think she was upset that I didn’t take our breakup any harder, but I’m not sure if that was it, and either way she started saying some horrible things about me. This was shortly before my failed suicide off the short building. It wasn’t the things she called me that upset me. For one, she called me sanctimonious, which my dictionary defines as “making an exaggerated show of holiness or moral superiority,” but I don’t think she knew what the word meant because I wasn’t that at all. But misused big words aside, it wasn’t the insults she threw at me that stung, it was the general feeling. She was someone that despite my new revelation I still vaguely cared about and she was trying to hurt me and that she was trying to hurt me was enough to make it hurt.

And it was also the things she said I wasn’t that stung. Worse than the intent alone. She said I wasn’t really nice or smart or funny or insightful or any of the other things she had called me when we were dating. She had only been humoring me because we were dating, she said. And she was probably right about all those things, maybe she was right and I don’t want to say that I was bothered by her accusations as much as the idea that I had been duped. She had fooled me, not into thinking that she had a high opinion of me—that had happened but didn’t bother me—what bothered me was that I could be tricked by such a simple transparent thing. And that such trickery was played at all, and suddenly I saw it everywhere I looked: someone laughing a bit too hard at a boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s joke, nodding too vigorously at another’s observation. Such obviously shallow pretension. The whole world was just silliness, or so I imagined. What’s that quote? “All is vanity?” Is that Moby Dick? That’s what I had hit on, only a century and a half later than Melville and with none of his sophistication, if that was really him.

This consumed me for weeks and I had a kind of kiddie sized existential crisis. I couldn’t imagine living another sixty years in such a world and I decided to kill myself. I decided I would jump off a building because I figured it would be easiest and I settled on the historic tavern in town because, at five stories, it was the tallest building I could find without driving a half hour into the city. Doing it right wasn’t worth a half hour drive to me, which seems like the kind of lesson my father should have taught me. There’s a lesson for you, kids. If you’re going to kill yourself, kill yourself right, even if it takes you thirty even forty-five minutes to get there.

I climbed up to the top floor of the tavern and found a way onto the roof, which was a lot easier than I expected it would be. How many historic taverns have stairways that go all the way up to the roof? One, probably, in the entire country, and I happen to live in the same town—only a three minute drive. And like I said, I was up there and I laughed. And I was so surprised and kind of horrified, though I couldn’t and still can’t identify why, that I slid over the edge without thinking. Down below there was a sidewalk and a flower bed and though the plan was to swan dive onto the pavement, I kind of rolled into the flower bed and broke a couple bones and hit my head and knocked myself out for a bit and was taken to the hospital. This wasn’t a big flower bed and one might think that I would have to aim to hit the flowers rather than the pavement, but that’s not how it was. I didn’t look. I just jumped, or rolled, rather, and I landed right on some flowers in front of a window looking into the lobby where someone saw me fall and called 911.

I don’t know if this last part is true. But as soon as there was nothing but air under me, I was so terrified and so consumed with regret I’m surprised I didn’t die right there in the air, five stories above the earth. I do know this is true, actually. I feel it so strongly there is no mistaking the reality of it. In that second I was in the air, I thought “I’ll never be anything.” That flashed through my mind in an instant, before I had even rolled completely off the roof and then my mind was empty, completely empty for the rest of the trip down, cleared of everything but the physical reality of the sensation of rushing wind and approaching ground. And the frightening thing is that I know that’s what is facing me when I die for real. That’s how I know that what I’ve done is a terrible terrible thing that goes against nature. Nobody should have to see his last moment years before it comes. They were like a physical presence, and though they’re gone now, those words will haunt me for the rest of my life and when it is finally time to die, they will come back, just as they were before. At first, it was obvious to me that those words were a pang of regret and resignation, but now I’m not so sure it wasn’t a choice, a principle, a mission statement, an act of defiance. Which seems silly, but I don’t think I’ve let it go. In many ways and to many people, my character is completely different now. Unthinkably different. But I’ve still done nothing, really. And I don’t even know what that means and I don’t even know how I would go about doing or being anything, invalidating that last message that is waiting for me for the next time I die, but maybe I am just saying this to myself so I don’t have to do anything, so I can keep up the charade of false rebellion. And I have been given a real revelation, I think. A real understanding, a real vision, if not of the afterlife then of the last moment of consciousness. And now I have this burden of trying to decode those words that will stay with me for the rest of my life, but imagine how much worse it would have been if I hadn’t lived. If I had done it right and if I was accelerating towards the earth at negative nine point eight meters per second squared and I heard or saw or received the words and had only that fleeting moment before I hit the ground to understand them. “I’ll never be anything,” and then it’s over, with only enough time for a flicker of reception before it is all extinguished forever, condemned to understand the revelation or else prove it and become it and nothing more than it, a ghostly epitaph scraped off the pavement by a firefighter with a giant spatula, laughing and throwing itself into oblivion to escape itself, its emptiness, its absence, its nothingness.

Or maybe I’m just a fuck-up with a lot of stupid ideas. Who can tell.