Suicide - a Short Story
Written in 1990.

I've never considered suicide myself. This is my meagre attempt to understand it.



Pills lay scattered over the bedside table.

There was the smell of vomit. . A lamp sprayed yellow light up to a circle on a ceiling of flaking aged lead paint. . Everything in the room wreakedreeked of depression: the wardrobe, the bed, the carpet the scattered piles of magazines, hand written and typed notes on the floor, the antiquated mechanical typewriter.

His baby Mohawk haircut was slapped sweating against his head. The sheets were stuck to his body with the help of death's fruit: shit, piss, vomit and sweat. . He’ had been careful. He had dissolved the sleeping pills into an infusion hoping to fall gently through death's door. This time he was determined to succeed. . Attempt number five. It tasted artificial, sickly sweet, a cocktail of reminders of the heavy grey ghost that was his life. He sat ritually on the bed. . Impatience kept him from Hamlet's final dream, so he swallowed a handful of the remaining pills washing them down with scotch.

Impatience was his fatal flaw; the tragedy of a would-be hero artist who couldn’t understand the delay between the ideal and the real. He threw-up. Failed…… again. He sat immersed in the truth of his life. He started over. He stumbled almost losing it again as he walked from the sunroom once balcony, which was his kitchen. He felt the ecstatic effects as the deadly tea began to do its work. Success at last.

Forty, today and the century turned into a new millennium. His life meant nothing and would pass unnoticed. His youthful dreams were nightmares in the post- modern death of creativity. His talent went unrecognised because he lacked the charisma for the gorgeous angst of fashion or the pumped up defences against impotence that protected his competition from dealing with reality. The papers on the floor represented his life's work, a montage of the battle to overcome the demon within. Words, sentences, paragraphs occasionally even chapters all completed by the three dots of retreat, each a carefully crafted moment of genius. An expectant pause, aborted. . Van Gogh, at least, had given birth to his conceptions. Now, living a Van Gogh dreaming would leave him merely dead, a sacrifice to the god of statistics. Even this final success would arrive only at the roll of the the god's’ die.

His arm moved - a quick reflexive tick. It was a final impulse from a nervous system reluctantly giving up its function. He settled. His leg kicked. An isolated muscle wanted to go walkies. His life passed over and through him and still it struggled to maintain the appearance of itself. Finally his sphincters released their contents to the great beyond. His cells protested as starvation put nature back in command of their destiny. All would be soil soon.

His diary was a confrontation with raw helplessness. Frustration. Suicide as success, a life affirming step towards self. It was a courageous step into the safety of the unknown, of knowledge beyond mortality, being able to say ‘no’ to life was the only power he felt. We, Tthe living, who seek a category for the insanity of questioning life's sanctity, wouldare be blinded to his struggle with a shadow in a a darkness our reason prevented and prevents us from seeing.

As his light dispersed the warmth of his hugs of his lips of his sex was eclipsed by the warmth of decay. The chemistry of goodbye the mortician's illusion tries hide.. The spaces within expand with the methane bouquet of life's final gift to itself; fertilizer death as life's nourishment. The ultimate relaxation results in icy stiffness, fluid life’s final rejoinder.

For we who live no amount of reading will give us the peace we seek in the face of his great statement. It is done. What can be said? Feelings ask for action. The family gathers with friends he could not touch, canwill never touch. Who was he? Each stood at the microphone and with unexpected honesty told of frustration, anger, sadness, love and lessons. The many ways he touched yet could not feel. In his death each discovered community. The feelings ran so deep words became actions.

At the end someone says we should publish his writing but it was out place because it was a future, not the now. It was so empty; the words lacked meaning. He knew his death would be ordinary that is why it was the only choice left.