My Suicide Note

Budd Dwyer Blues

There’s a book out there by Emil Cioran called The Trouble with Being Born; I completely agree with the sentiment, even though I’ve never actually bothered to read the book.

Juliana read the sentence out loud, once, twice; she promptly selected the whole ending paragraph and deleted it. She leaned back on her chair, picking at her teeth in frustration. It had to be good; good enough to be left beside her dead corpse without inspiring stifled laughter. The emergency medical professionals who’d discover her corpse are sure to be connoisseurs of the suicide note; hers could not be mundane, forgettable like the others. This was her very last act; as a poet, as a human— as a lump of flesh aspiring to be both of those things. “Perfect purity,” she mumbled to herself; “possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.” However, this did not strike her as a line of poetry, nor a splash of blood. It was more an absent-minded scribble, rendered in cheap ugly middle-school ink on her tattered notebook. She opened another window, and looked for a font where the dots on the ‘i’ were replaced with hearts. She imagined her note blown-up on broadcast television, read by the dolled-up presenter straining to hold back her tears. She went back to her very first line, clearing her throat and doing her best impression of an amiable yet stoic ‘lil blonde: “hello world, I’ve decided to kill myself today.”

Juliana got up to go to the store. She’d enjoyed the store as a child, holding her mother’s hand and pointing to things she’d like. She’d picked up on the game quick— her requests would become increasingly profligate, to the growing irritation of her mother. “I want four of those,” she’d shout while pointing at a pig’s head. She imagined putting them in a row on her living room floor, pretending to be the leader of the cavalry. “Charge!” she would have shouted, pointing her toy sword at the cat. She laps up the puddle of blood. Her mother’s response was always that of denial; Juliana had to learn quick that her desires would never be met.

Juliana was at the store. The incessant nature of the products gave her a headache. Passing by the dozens of rows of anonymous chips, crackers, frozen dinners, sausages and soda; she felt as if she had been lifted up into the air from her waist, paraded through the shop by foreign means of locomotion. She felt like a chicken breast drying up under a lamp. She’d gone past the potato chips three of four times; on the fifth time, she felt her body stop. If it had been three weeks prior, she’d have experimented with someone incredible hunger-artistry. She would have taken three meals a day of potato chips for an entire month: plain for breakfast, sour cream and onion for lunch, salt and vinegar for dinner— on special occasions, one of the more exotic flavors like barbeque or bacon. For every meal, she’d pick the most disgusting reality TV show she could find (trashy, full of idiot sex and empty ambitions); afterwards, she’d take an hour-long bath. A thought came to her mind; she took out her notebook, made a few circles with her pen, then wrote down what she mumbled to herself: “I’m leaving this Earth to the other 7.951 billion. Let one of them aspire to fill their days with meaningless sex and endless consumption.” She smiled, then quickly crossed out the line. “Too juvenile,” she whispered.

“Why is it so difficult to kill yourself?” she muttered as she stood in line at the cashier. “A noose,” she muttered. “A noose, and all the Ativan.” She muttered. “A noose, all the Ativan, in my bathtub.” She tried to imagine every possible permutation. “All the Ativan, and I drop myself from my building. All the Ativan, a gun, and I drop myself from my building.” She looked down at her items: fruits, vegetables, a few frozen meats, one or two canned coffees. She looked at the candy, laughing because she’d caught herself counting calories. “I wouldn’t want to die fat,” she said to the sun-dried woman behind herself. The woman gave a polite smile. She took two Kit-Kats from a carton and threw them down on the belt as if they were dice. She smiled to the cashier as he scanned her items. “I’m going to kill myself soon;” she imagined blurting it out, unburdening her secret. Her smile grew wider, as if it were all a grand vacation plan. She thought of taking the little microphone beside the cashier: “nothing happens when you die, and I’ll see you all there.”

“Of course,” she spat after she’d left the store. “It’s perfect!” She dropped one of her shopping bags and pulled out her notebook, scribbling down that last thought before it escaped into the air to pollute some other psyche instead. The parking lot before her was full of gastropods, for whom death was merely the ultimate inconvenience. A homeless man approached her, his beard white and overgrown and his pants full of stains. He stuck out his hand; his nails were black and his skin was leathery. “My name is Emory,” he intoned with a rasp. Juliana shook his hand; the grease felt good to her skin. “How are you, Emory?” She asked. Emory shook his head, scratched his arm. “Not so good these days,” he said with a smile. His teeth were yellow’d, hardened. “You want some money, Emory?” she said with a slight yelp. Emory shook his head; he rubbed his hands on his jacket. “I’m trying to get somewhere, you know? Anywhere.” Juliana always believed her excess empathy was a disability rather than a strength— in her mind, the separation between her and this man was merely one of circumstance. She put the notebook back into her purse and rubbed her face. “Tonight is your lucky night, buddy.” Emory looked up and down; he thought of polluting her beauty with his grimy hands, making her breasts black with his touch. He felt it might humanize him. Juliana pulled out twenty dollars from her wallet and placed it in his hands. “That’s the last money I have to my name. I won’t need it where I’m going.” She smiled as she picked up her shopping bags and headed for the bus station.

Beyond the windows of the bus, the world passed by her. Her notebook lay open before her, the lines polluted with individual thought patterns. “Like you, I am just a passenger on His great bus. Last stop: heaven. I merely chose to step off one stop early.” More a song lyric than a killer suicide note. “Death is the end of fearing death; the greatest relief of all.” Too Hallmark-y. “I kindly stopped for Death— and saved him a bunch of trouble.” She drew a few skulls, one of the chewing on Dickinson’s head.

Juliana got off her bus stop and saw an older man with frazzled hair trying to throw pebbles at her window. She’d turned off her phone a few days ago; there was no-one she’d hope to hear from. She thought of placing one of the shopping bags over her head and pretending to be someone else instead. She practiced the few lines of Cao Xueqin she could remember, hoping to come across as hostile and foreign. The older man turned to Juliana; his expression turned violent as she ran towards Juliana. “What if he kills me,” she thot. “That would be annoying. I didn’t finish my note yet.”

“Where have you been?” He shouted. He pulled out his phone to emphasize his anger. “I’ve been trying to call you for days… I was worried you’d;” Juliana cut him short by walking past him towards her apartment. The man followed her up to her door, where Juliana dropped her bags to reach for her keys. “You were just going to…” the man thought for a second, “ghost me?” Juliana turned her face to him for the first time, smiling. “Ghost you? Surely you mean, I’m going to haunt you!” She giggled as she turned the key.

He followed her up to her apartment, wheezing as she placed her shopping bags on the counter. He looked around, surprised by the immaculate state of her apartment. The usual battlefield of loose paper notes, open books strewn about, cut-out pages stuck to the wall… the room had been drained of its life, now anemic with chipping paint and stains. “I don’t think you’re well,” the man boomed. Juliana cleaned an apple, taking a bite; “not wanting to sleep with you is not a mental illness, Arshak.” The man wiped his face with a paper towel, then motioned towards the sink. “A glass of water, please.” Juliana stopped chewing for a few moments, then set down her apple and poured Arshak a glass of water. As she watched him drink, she cleaned her teeth with her nails. “I think you need help. I can help you, I can help you, Juliana…” Juliana felt nauseous; these words didn’t suit Arshak. “Don’t you have a kid to pick up from school or something?” Arshak wiped his mouth as he studied the lines on Juliana’s face— once, he might have drowned her personality in his pornographic imagination, her expressions of ecstasy merely one in a sea of Fernando Valley smiles.

But between gulps of lukewarm water, he could only see himself in the twitching sulfur lakes of her eyes. In her sudden absence, he had taken to reading Juliana’s poetry; even to his vulgar mind, the talent she displayed in her violent, nimble compositions inspired admiration and devotion. He wanted to become her, somehow. “I would leave my wife for you,” he blurted out. “I would leave my children.” Juliana couldn’t stop herself from laughing. “Because your wife doesn’t let you fuck her ass,” she spat. The vulgarity made it easier to say but the must of the apartment turned sour. Arshak finished his water without saying a word, fixed his hair, then departed through the front door. She watched him clean the flyers off his windshield, his face leaden and without expression. She regretted her casual cruelty, delivered with a single deft stroke; this was her loathsome talent, to devastate with brevity. She reached for her purse and took out her notebook to write a few lines: “my face covered in chocolate, my hands calloused. My mouth sweet, my kisses serene. A pure smile that collapses into wrinkles. I am my own daughter, I give birth to myself anew every morning; a virgin again.” She read the lines out loud; she cursed this impulse towards obfuscation, as if the clarity of water suggests there to be no substance at all. She crosses out all the lines; she sketches the page black. All of them wanted to be ‘closer,’ to ‘know her’ in complete intimacy— they would not believe her when she informed them that there just was nothing more beyond what they already knew.

Juliana cut up a few slices of an orange and returned to her computer. She read her entire suicide note again; one time quietly, one time out loud. She threw out a few paragraphs, rewrote a few others. “Be more immediate, more intimate,” she muttered to herself. She took out sentences she believed to be ‘too MFA,’ too ‘try-hard.’ She read it again; she made a few more changes. She read it one last time:

hello world,
I’ve decided to kill myself today.

I know some would find the bluntness of that statement distasteful. They might favor indirect language (“I’ve decided to leave this world today.”), or a metaphor that makes it all seem like a journey or some great mystical process to which we are mere bystanders. But I wish to stress that I’ve made a choice, and act according to my choice by sheer will. I reject the journey wholeheartedly, and I stand in contempt against this oppressive so-called mystical process. One is given a life and charged with the task of living it— I have chose to take full responsibility for the entire course.

But I am not callous. I know that this will hurt tremendously those I leave behind. I know I will be grieved by my mother and my sister, who will be begging GOD to please not let their worst nightmares come true as the police ask about me. I know I will be grieved by those who enjoyed the shortlist of kindnesses I’d been able to muster in an otherwise selfish life, who will remember me warmly and kindly and tell themselves what a terrible tragedy it all is. I know there will be those that will grieve for the future memories we will no longer share— I want them to know that I share in that grief. I wish I could wait for you; I wish there was a cosmic waiting room where we’d all await the end of eternity together. I am sorry for the pain I’ve caused all of you.

But I do not wish to be alive any more. I see others rise up from their bed without a single thought given to the incredible indignities we are born to suffer. I wish I was like them. I wish I could magically pull reasons to live from the black hat of this life; I rummaged and discovered nothing. I don’t love other people. Other people do not love me because I am deficient, I am incapable of being loved. I enjoy helping other people, but only selfishly; for a while, it served as a distraction from the terrible fate that awaits all of us. No more.

And you… you were everything to me. The one pure well of happiness that seemed to endlessly overflow with water. You gave me stability in a world addicted to violent change, safety in bodies that do not care for our sentimentality and stubborn clinging towards life. I will always love you, and I hope you understand that my unending cruelty is a product of love I am incapable of expressing any other way. I hope you understand why I did what I did. I don’t want you to remember me in pity and anger. Everyone’s time on this Earth comes to an end; mine ends today.

I’ve tried very hard to do things, and to do them by myself. I suppose that is another failing of mine. I doggedly insisted that some great rewards awaits me if I did everything the way I believed it should be; I strained and toiled accordingly to what I believed to be higher principles above the shitting and eating and fucking of base human existence. But I could never reach my aspirations: I wasn’t good enough. And when I realized that nothing existed beyond those aspirations, I saw a cold and indifferent universe in which my entire life was merely an awkward blink of an eye. And it seems everyone was in on this great cosmic joke except me; everyone turns to laugh at how stupid I look as my wings melt and I crater back down into common mud.

In the end, I’m merely a poor con artist who failed to fool anyone except herself. So conceited and blind was I that I did not recognize myself amongst the thousands of other con artists. I’m merely one among many, a mediocrity who will get the fate she deserves— and I see now that this is the true meaning of justice. Who am I to betray myself? It’s time I call it quits and take my exit before we all get bored of me. My time in the rat races are over. I’ll let the other 7.951 billion have their turn.

Forever yours,
Juliana

She let the words sit for a while. She listened to the cars passing by her window. She listened to the children playing on the street, their mothers sharing gossip. She sighed. “No, this just isn’t coming together the way it should. It’s pedestrian. It’s a text message.” Juliana deleted the whole document; she dropped it into the trash bin without a second thought. Without a good suicide note, she saw no point to the whole enterprise. She would just be another sad causality turning cold in a local morgue. She would give it another try next year, hoping the words would come to her more easily.