No Time For Suicide

I don’t want to live. Every day, when I wake up, the only thing that gets me out of bed is that I know that in about 18 or so hours, I will be able to get back into bed. Sleep is my salvation, such a sweet sanctuary, because the business of walking and talking, being myself, taking me here and there, with my head and my thoughts, is often too much to bear. My soul feels heavy on the earth, trudging through weeks, days, months, years, with a vague hope that things might be good someday, isn’t doing it for me anymore. I don’t believe things will get better, and I know that people will get mad at me for saying that, which will just make me feel worse and bring me closer to the edge.

Some time ago, I was visiting a friend at the hospital, a beautiful man, older than me, but not so much. He looked at me with his cerulean blue eyes, fringed with blonde lashes, eyes that have seen the most glorious things, the late summer water festival at Chaing Mai, the bustling cocaine driven New York art scene of the ’80s, long, cool Tangier nights beneath a Paul Bowles sky, countless trysts in Tokyo Love Hotels, the dim light of his dying lover’s face as it darkened and then disappeared, the lush and endless lavender fields in Aix, the paintings he did of all of these wondrous places and faces, a life lived without caution or sensible shoes, enviable and dramatic. My dear friend’s eyes, wet with tears, fixed me in a sorrowful gaze. He was quiet for a moment, then he sighed and said “I’m tired of life.” He had been sick for so long, and fought for the entire time, and he didn’t want to be at war anymore. He wanted to go home, even if home meant somewhere that he’s never been before, even if home might be a grave. And he went. I was glad for him. I did not go to the funeral, because it was one where people would rock out with their own selfish grief. I knew that he would have hated that. Respectfully, I held back and went to a movie instead. I am not sure, but I believe it was “Babe II, Pig in the City”. It made me cry relentlessly, that little dog in the wheelchair, dreaming of running free.

I would like to go home too. I am tired of life. It’s too messy. It will never be clean. No matter what, I have never been able to live it the way that I should have. If I had only been more careful, thoughtful, smarter, shrewder, cautious, selective… if I didn’t always throw myself into experience, toss the elements of my life like a salad, just to see what it would taste like. I have never lived up to my potential, and my attempts to do so will never measure up to my expectations and the fact that I have measured what is good and acceptable is stupid and set up to make sure that no matter what I do, I feel like a failure. Love has remained forever elusive, and the current state of my relationships show no improvement. This however bothers me less than the constant well meant advice that I get from friends, the reminders of what I do wrong, how I do it wrong, why I do it wrong, what I should do now, what I need to do now, who they will pick for me in future.…the cure will kill you, don’t you know? How do I have the heart to tell them I am not planning on a future? I have never had love, never expect to find it, know that it is not what I am meant to have in this life, that children will never call me ‘mommy’, that I will live alone and die alone and I don’t care. It doesn’t make me sad. It just makes me tired and want to go to sleep. Of course, anyone would look at my life and say that I have no reason to complain, that I have done worthwhile things and have helped people so much, and I feel guilt that I am not more gracious about what I have been given. But people look to me for answers, and I try to give them, but honestly, I don’t know anything. The answers are as much truth as I have to give, but that truth never helped me at all. If it helps someone else, then I am glad for that. Sometimes people want to hug me, and that is nice, but sometimes they are drunk and put me in a headlock, which hurts. I am having a problem with my Paypal account. It seems that it will not allow me to send money, which has put my Ebay account in jeopardy, as I am on the brink of being considered a non paying bidder, persona non grata in the World’s Biggest Marketplace, threatening one of the few precious examples of untarnished beauty in my world.
Suicide is on my mind frequently, but unlikely, as I have an innate curiosity that makes me want to see how things will turn out. It doubles as a life force, but I just take what I can get. There are also a variety of things that will keep me alive another day.

I have tickets to see James Taylor next month.

I really, really, really like that Beyonce song, and I have yet to see the video, and I think that I am going to treat myself and get the dvd.

I am depressed, but I will not take an antidepressant, because I’d rather be miserable than numb. Lepers cannot feel their limbs, which is why they fall off. If it hurts, I would rather know that it does.

I need to get to the bottom of that Paypal issue.

I am kind of wondering if Arnold will actually become governor.

My dear friend Bruce does an impression of a male stripper doing the “Robot” and it makes me laugh so hard with such immediacy that I cannot even laugh, I am only breathlessly able to choke out the word, “OW! OW!” because it hurts – it is that funny. Also, Bruce and I went to Emeril’s restaurant in New Orleans and he pointed out that he didn’t hear one “BAM!!!” from the kitchen, which proved to us that they just weren’t trying.

My dogs save my life, because sometimes I think, “Today is a good day to die.” And then I remember I have to take Bronwyn to the groomer to have her nails clipped, and Ralph needs to play ball every morning as the vet has told him that he is overweight. Plus, they hate the vet, and will both literally shake with fear and both try to hide behind my legs. Whose legs will they hide behind if not mine? Who will take them on a ‘W-A-L-K?’ So I decide to live, and that suicide is not a viable option.
There is a God, and I don’t want to make a bunch of excuses about why I thought my life was so bad that I had to end it, because you know if you off yourself, you have some explaining to do when you get up there in that light and everything. All these old people would give you a lot of shit, nobody would sit at your table in the cafeteria, it would be like transferring to a new school mid-semester where people had been given advance notice that you were infected with cooties.

As I get older, I like lemonade more and more.

I don’t want to be another dead comic.