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You Die from Sadness

Christina Tumminello

You suffer from depression, opaque misery of the mind.
     When the depression comes you believe, fear, that it could probably cause your death at some random moment in the future.
     It's a misery that forces you to think at odd times, perhaps while driving, how easy it would be, how easy to just turn the steering wheel a little to the left and just end it all; do a head on into a utility pole or a tree.
     A moment's courage or a moment's cowardice and life is over.
     All that you'll know is oblivion, nothingness.

     The violent hallucination frightens you.
     Somewhere in the middle of the vapid nectar, in the middle of the swamp of misery, through the tears and vacancy of the sadness comes a light, and you find air, freedom.
     A voice screams for you to breathe.
     Live!
     Shame follows, and you begin to hate yourself.
     You hate yourself for the contemplation of raping and mugging your own life.

     A remembrance descends.
     You have an older cousin.
     She had five uncles.
     These five brothers chose death in the face of life. They hanged themselves, each in their turn, five of them, following the death of their mother.
     Strangely, the suicides became a perverse joke in your family.
     "Do you remember Uncle Joe," your older cousin would say, "he died of shortness of breath."

     A "bell jar" descends.
     There were two girls.
     They went to school up the street from your house. You graduated from that school, in fact, ten years earlier.
     Together they got stoned and drunk and threw themselves under the train in Stony Brook.
     No one understood why.
     Everyone cried.
     Self-murder was their cure for fear; it was the opiate for cowardice perhaps.
     You drive over those tracks daily, and you cannot avoid the thought of them. Flashes of the violence fleck your imagination, of the train's enormous, searing wheels riding over them, the horror of the conductor, the poor helpless conductor unable to stop the raging locomotive.
     The newspapers reported that the two girls lay between the rails. When the train came, they consciously had to grasp at the undercarriage to make certain that they were dragged beneath the wheels.
     If they hadn't made the effort, if they hadn't pulled themselves under the train, they would have survived. The train would have missed them.
     You wondered if they liked Sylvia Plath, the patron saint of suicidal overachievers.

     Death is a part of life.
     It's probably easier than life, the act of dying, the act of drifting away from life, but somehow it seems unreachable, close yet elusive, distant and unattainable.
     Where do you cross the water?
     Intellectually you know that you will die one day, but the reality of the abstraction is quite different. You cannot conceive of your pretty, milky white fingers decaying, your eyes never moving, your lips never parting to smile.

     Before the gun explodes in your mouth, you taste the coldness of the steel; before oblivion descends, you taste the sleeping pills and swallow the drink of choice; before you drown you must contend with the cold water engulfing you, the moment of exhaustion, panic and desperation ... and yet ... life is there.

     Life.
     There is gentle music in that word.
     It is your strongest unconscious wish, to live.
     You want to live.
     Your will chooses life, always, always, always, in spite of the desire to die when the sadness exerts its intimate seduction.

     You practice dying.
     You see yourself dead, lying in your coffin.
     You blot out the grief you cause.
     Then you run to the voice that pulls you the other way, away from the voice whispering the temptation of self-annihilation, taunting you to turn the car a little to the left, to the violence ... to the peace.

     Life.
     Your will, that serene voice in your mind reels and screams, "I want to live!"

     You retract into calm.
     The whirlwind subsides.

     You can still hear them, those who actually pulled the trigger or swallowed the pills, the moment before the final reflex; then, it was over; the silence came, and they were gone.
     You are haunted by their misery, by their breathing, breathing, breathing when you are alone in your bed at night.
They never leave you, alone.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.