A few months ago I had started missing time. I’d look at my watch and be shocked that only a few minutes had passed in what seemed hours of ennui. Then I’d look again to find it was three in the morning and I hadn’t moved from my couch for over fifteen hours, and I had no one to talk to about it. It had gotten progressively worse from there. A soul-crushing nothingness called “Down in the Zero”.
An impossibly heavy absence of anything worth holding onto.
I had gone through this before, and the cure was always to go find a war to fight in. But there was no escaping it this time. No war to fight, no Army that would have me. This time I was at the end of it all.
Yet for somebody as well acquainted with death as I am, I was doing an exceptionally shitty job of ending my life.
The household lights were bright and cheerful, I was sitting in my nearly empty living room listening to a fun, lighthearted audiobook, and I had the windows open on a glorious, wet, September afternoon in Maryland. Nary a classic indicator of depression in sight (except for that rain, but I’m Irish and I love it).
I had done all of that to feel something – anything – and maybe have a reason to not kill myself.
It wasn’t working.
This morning I called the Utilities company and scheduled the power and gas to be turned off.
