Suicide CW.

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I’m not supposed to be this kind of body, I tell myself as my consciousness fades. I’m not supposed to be alive at all. 

The water is as cold as I thought it would be, and colder, even, as I sink beneath it. The realization that I survived the impact comes too late and burns with too much agony. I can’t look past the dark of the water, my vision obscured by a void-black inverted nothing. It hurt when I touched down, my body slamming into the movement like a fatal vehicle crash, my body splayed out and chunked and halved and unrecognizable on the road with debris embedded in the flesh. It hurt when I touched down, the freeze gripping me with its many, many hands and pulling me under to close the deal. I taste copper and salt in my mouth, the water flooding through each cavity in my head and clearing the humanity out as it goes. My body falls limp in the throes, curling itself up fetal into the same position we all end up in when it is our time to end or to begin. My body convulses, and my body soils itself, and my body ascends, and my body sinks. 

I’m not supposed to be alive.

This is true in every fathomable aspect of the phrase, but something doesn’t feel right. I feel juxtaposed against the water, my half-corpse out of place underneath a sunlight that just barely peers out from behind a blanket of clouds. I feel taken from the water, ripped out of the womb, a premature birth. I feel the water take its claws and dig small tunnels into my pores, threading life into me and embroidering me beautiful. The water’s temperature begins to increase, and instead of accepting my fate, my body begins to thrash around, voluntarily this time, searching for any remaining exit, anything to grab onto, anything tangible. It moves without command, without promise. I feel my fingernails crack as my body pilots a hand above the water, fingertips just barely scratching hard against some sort of… tiled surface?

The water continues to heat up, and I know I have to get out of here or I am going to die. I should be dead already, though—that’s the whole point of killing yourself. It was destined to be this way, divinely written and divinely etched and divinely scarred. They wanted to take me back to that place—to their prison of white fabric and hard cots in shared rooms and soft tablets forced down the gullet—but dying on my own terms felt far more appealing than spending the rest of my life scrubbing hospital soap into my hair and covering my chest around nurses. I get to choose how and when I suffer, I reasoned with myself, and no one else would ever control me or strip me or devour me again.

How’s that working out for you, hm?

My foot hits against a sunken rock, and I use it to push myself up further, my grip finally landing on something solid. But this one isn’t tiled–it feels smoother, polished, like a railing. The core of me, this suicidal monsterthing, pulls herself up with tired force and rubs her eyes. It feels weird to think of myself in third person, but it doesn’t feel like me at all; I wanted this, I chose this. I can’t still be alive. I can’t still be kicking.

I rub the crud and sting from my eyes, and I feel the sun’s warmth like hands over my shoulders. The sun touches me like a calming lover, embracing my sides, running its touch in patterns over my pale skin. Constellations of fingertips. I don’t remember it being this warm before I jumped, but I’m not going to complain. It’s a jolting familiarity, an odd comfort despite the circumstances.

When I open my eyes–

When I open my eyes I am not in Minnesota. I open my eyes and I am back home again, back underneath the talons of Phoenix, Arizona, the city that consumes you. The city that consumed me, my body just too torn to be resisted. I died here when I was six, and now I’m going to die here for good.

It takes a moment for me to recognize the exact location. I haven’t lived at this apartment complex since the single digits. Last I had heard, the complex was sold and demolished to build a warehouse store in its place, but my memory has never been my strongest asset. I see everything the way it was when I lived here: the pink curtains of my bedroom window visible in the building above, the over-stuffed rack of pool toys no one used, the lion statue with the chipped paint they put in to make the complex seem nicer than it was. It’s all a perfect recreation of my youth, where I lived the first time I was fed and skinned and cooked. This isn’t reality, which means that I must be dead.

I hear a voice in my soul, and I feel a voice in my soul, and I birth a voice in my soul, and then I kill the voice in my soul. The voice screams – screamed – will scream: get us out of here.

If I can, I have to get out of here.

I have to die. If they find me—

You’d think that the afterlife would come with a built-in tour guide, or maybe an instructions manual, or a map. Regardless of which one you get sent to. In the stories there’s always someone to invite you in – whether it’s a family member, a beloved pet, God, Satan, or Anubis. Someone always wants you there. There’s always some place for you to end up.

This is just cruel.

I look beneath me in the water. The pool is shallow on one end, and six feet deep in the other. There isn’t a trace of the lake left.

I’m still in my nightclothing, the ones I chose for the act. I left my apartment in a nightgown and slip-on shoes and I gave all of my belongings away to people on the street and I killed myself in a gown with my favorite TV character’s face printed on it so no one could take me away from myself. The funniest aspect of all of this is that Technoelle’s face on the fabric has smudged away, her robotic frame now a blur of watery grays and blues. I’m all alone now. I look down at my hands – pale, water-wrinkled. My soaked gown only pulls me down.

I wrap both of my hands around my neck and squeeze as hard as I can. My hands ache at the stretch and pressure, and my throat burns on the inside, but I remain breathing throughout it all, my airways entirely unobstructed despite the grab. That’s odd; I dig my fingernails in and there isn’t any pain at all.

So I sink back underneath the water, craving the water again, embracing the reaper’s flow. The water enters through my nose and mouth and fills up my scratched throat, pooling and nesting into my chest, a grating sensation. I wait for the end, for death, the extinguishing of me that should have occurred long ago, the extraction of my blemish – but I just keep living, I just keep fucking living. Or whatever the fuck you can call this state of existence. I’m conscious, and ostensibly alive, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about the situation.

I swim over to the side of the pool, and, as a last ditch effort, slam my forehead into it with the hardest force I can manage. I ram my head into the wall, over and over, and the impact is intoxicating, the impact is just too pleasurable. I get so engrossed in the comfort of the repetition, the plush touch of the hard pool tile and the seas of blues, that I don’t notice the lack of blood and pain until I’ve been doing it for several minutes, too long. I’m acting like a diseased animal, something with a brain that simply doesn’t work quite right, decaying away into bone and maggot, and this behavior should be beneath me.

Nothing is beneath me. I am already at the planet’s bottom. I am already as deep as one can possibly get into the realm of fucked, screwed, and damned.

I rise back to the surface and cough, trying to expel the inhaled water from my body, coughing up liquid and spit and snot onto the pool’s edges. In my soul I hear again: can you give it a rest now?

My fists bang on the tile. I punch and slash and hiss. Whoever put me here–

I must have been taken here. That’s the only explanation. I just have to figure out how.

Nothing about this screams afterlife in any capacity! Something is very, very, very wrong! I have to get out of here so I can die properly!

But it’s tiring.

“Okay,” I say, my voice wet and strained. “Joke’s over. I’m done. Let me die.”

There’s a boom of thunder in the backdrop, but the sky remains clear and the sun never abandons it. I’m getting sicker and sicker with each passing second.

“Get me out of here,” I wail. “I’m not fucking joking. Get me out of here. Get me out.”

No thunder this time. A nothingness.

Fine. I’ll find my own way out.

I feel the water around me begin to heat up as I move towards the pool stairs. I swim faster. The sun above twirls from gentle into scorching, the pool’s temperature rising with my body’s frantic flails—I swim faster. I swim faster, and the sky blinds with its brightness as the water around me begins to bubble up and bubble over, sending stings of pain into my frame from the neck down. I swim faster, and the stairs seem further away with each stroke, and the water is just getting angrier and angrier and angrier. The water is angry at me, its hands curling over me too reminiscent of my dissection as a child, my body speared for the hunt and boiled just like this. The water, surely, is trying to boil me up again – to purify me into something drinkable, something that won’t bite when consumed.

The first stair feels like sandpaper when I touch down on it. I see swirls of red behind me from the bottom of my feet, but I have to keep going. There’s pain now—as I reach the second stair I feel the sear of the fingernails I had embedded in my neck earlier, my head singing operas of agonies as something trickles down my temples. I step out of the water.

I forgot how hot the ground can get during Arizona summers. My footsteps trace blood around the concrete as my feet blister and run. I waddle, I writhe, and when I adjust to being outside of the pool, I scramble to the gated entrance nearby. Thoughts flood through me like an alien invasion as I bolt, thoughts that can’t be mine booming through my inner halls like microphone-amplified screams:

You know you can’t run from this! You know you can’t hide! Where are you going, Madison? Where do you fit in? Where can you possibly run to that is completely and entirely safe?

You have to listen to me for once. Open your eyes. Open your mind up, too, while you’re at it.

Come on, Madison. You’re better than this.

I couldn’t stop you from killing yourself, but I can stop you from getting us eaten. Stop running.

“No,” I breathe.

I place my hand on the gate, my palm burning against off-white crumbling paint, but it won’t budge. Locked.

See? I told you. You don’t know how to avoid getting eaten. I don’t want to go down with you, kiddo, so you’ve got to figure this out.

“Or,” I say, reaching my hand around to the other side of the gate and pulling on the pitifully cheap lock, “I can just do this.”

I did this a lot when we were–

When I was a kid, I used to come to the pool in the middle of the night. I’d spend all my money on locks so that each time I broke one, I could replace it without anyone knowing I’d been in there, but I think they knew anyway. My childhood was spent melting away in this pool, and I’m not going to spend my death here too.

The gravel of the sidewalk digs into my skin as I run. I have to make it to my old apartment, to my old bedroom, to my old bed and my stuffed animals and my blankets. For some reason my mind accepts it as truth: if I can get home, I can get out.

Something brushes against my heel. I walk towards the building, guided by the star of my bedroom curtains. At first the touch is subtle, sun-gentle, so light it almost escapes me, but the laps at my ankles soon grow into claws as I pad toward my apartment. The touch digs into my thin skin, sending sparks of pain up my calves and into my thighs like clotted blood. In combination with the burns and cuts on the bottom of my feet, it registers as almost unbearable, but I can’t stop now. I have to keep going. I have to make it there, I have to get home.

Home. How interesting.

I never considered this place home before, but apparently some buried aspect of my mind makes the unfortunate correlation. Before I killed myself I vowed to never think about – or miss – Arizona ever again.

A lot of people will say that home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling. I feel the word home like a noose tightening around my throat, stringing me up as the star over the Christmas tree. I feel home biting at the backs of my legs. I feel home and my uterus prolapses into the rest of me. I allow the concept of home to infect me and drain me right out of myself, abandoning my consciousness like discarded skin, and then I take the hollow shell of me and I run faster.

Inside the confining walls of my childhood home, I evaporate.

Everything looks the same – the same as it had been when I lived here, so long ago. My memories of it have always been fuzzy. Mostly I remember my bedroom, the pink curtains and the various toys scattered across the white carpet and the little hole in the wall I’d stick my baby teeth in whenever they fell out. I walk into my bedroom and I am faced with the unbearable reality of my existence, the tangible mark I left on the world I just exited, forced to witness my youth splayed right out in front of me hard and cold on the dollhouse roof. Like being held down and forced to watch the torture of a loved one, I am stuck here, and my prior self is being stripped and vivisected right in front of me.

I’ve always hated this apartment.

It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that my life was ruined in it. I hated how small it was, how cramped the bathrooms felt, how the walls cracked. I hated the neighbors and their noise and their pounding and how their daughters would trip me and pull my hair until I cried. Yes, the pain is a factor, but it is a factor I have trained myself to ignore.

I get so caught up in exploring the place, running my hands along the walls and sticking my fingers in each crevice, that I almost forget I’m being hunted. 

It’s a hunt, I realize, and the force of the understanding comes far too late. It’s a hunt, it has to be. I’m being chased, boiled, prepared. I’m being carved into-
What am I being carved into?
A meal?
A servant?
A prisoner?
A God?
I have significant experience with all of these things, but you can’t put I’ll be anything you want, do anything you want, force myself into boxes for you, eviscerate myself for you on a resume or dating app profile. I have been a servant before, serving the Big Bad Wolf until I transferred schools. I have been a prisoner before, huddled away from the door windows in the absence of a lockdown procedure. I have been a meal before; that has been established, and it looks like that might be my ending. I’ve also been with God before, and even then I wasn’t given a choice. I believe in God—I don’t believe in whatever this is. I don’t know what this thing /wants/ from me, other than the thrill of the chase.
…
…
…..
If it does eat me, will I die for good? It occurs to me that I tried to kill myself today, and now I’m trying to outrun my death. I’m stuck here, either way, but –
I don’t think I want to die.
It all hits me like a defibrillator pulse from the inside out, like someone is tenderly guiding me towards the desire to live. It registers as unbearable. I wanted to live, to be free from my pain; they simply wouldn’t let me, they just wouldn’t let me out. If something happens to you and you’re lucky enough to be shattered by it — well, get used to the vague, honey. 

I could have healed if they let me go back to her. Instead: white straps holding the limbs still. Instead: a lion-sized pill, caught in the trap of my throat every morning on its way down. Instead: house arrest. Instead: forced sedation. A sexless corrective rape where they penetrate all of my crevices with orange bottles and each tablet I do not swallow pushes the knife into my neck deeper and each order I do not obey tightens the leather and every breath I take is ripped out of me, against my will, and mounted like a tanned hide around a security camera watching my every move. It didn’t have to be this way. I tell myself, and the world, fruitlessly, that it didn’t have to be this way.

I go back into the main room and sit on the small sofa shoved against the wall. My wet clothing squelches as I rest on the surface,

Maybe you should change into something that isn’t soaking wet?

I just want a break. I just want somewhere to rest. There’s dirt and sand and lake-crud littering over my skin, though, so maybe she’s right.

Or: maybe I’m right.

Maybe the voice is right.

Maybe the distinction doesn’t matter.

“Maybe,” I reply, out loud. “If anything here will even fit me.”

You could always wear mom’s clothes.

My entire body stiffens up, shivers like it’s dying again. The other me is right- I could, in theory, drape myself in one of the dresses my mother wore back then, shroud myself in a picture of the living – but I think it would just hurt too much. I was the last—

Sorry. Just a suggestion.

“It’s okay,” I reply. 

You really should go get cleaned up.

“I know, but what’s the point? Eventually that thing is gonna get me, and then… God knows what.”

Can you see the future?

“No one can see the future.”

Then how can you be sure?

I shake my head, laugh, and stifle my replies.

Will you take a shower, though? Just for me?

“What, shower for myself?”

If it helps you to view it that way, sure.

I groan, dragging my hands over my face. “Fine. Sure. Whatever.”