A new prayer, a diary (1/?)
Wherever this leads
What appears? What makes itself known? A question is a hole, an absence through which the world slips and turns foreign. I tour the landscapes of my life on foot, traversing valleys and peaks both lush green and rock bare, looking for the cliff from which I may leap. The leap of suicide is a call for an ending which comes when the call for a portal to open up repeatedly fails. There is nowhere else but here, where life is unbearable. Where else, where else? The querent knocks again. Fate does not answer. The leap of suicide is not the leap I plan to take from the cliff which has not yet appeared. The cliff holds a portal at its feet, and through that portal I will appear, in grand silks, to myself. I will become known by myself, and no longer require the knowing of others. Then, I can take to a mountain, where I may live out the rest of my life. I want to die only when death is ready for me, not before.
*
I still live for the approval of others. Yesterday, my friend Paul commented on my shoes. “They’re kind of girly,” he said. Paul goes to the gym thrice a week and has a difficult relationship with his father. We met in National Service.
“Huh,” I replied.
“I’ll go get drinks,” Paul said. “What do you want?”
After he left, I studied my sneakers. Were they too delicate looking? The colour too pale? Honestly, they were my favourite pair of shoes. I still found them cool. When Paul came back, I folded my feet under my seat.
A podcast I listened to said you shouldn’t value the criticism of someone who you wouldn’t ask for feedback. I looked at Paul’s navy New Balances. Who gives a fuck what Paul thinks about my favourite sneakers? Me.
*
I’ve never attempted, but I’ve stood at the edges of pavements thinking what it’d be like to step in front of a car. I have thought about the arteries, the bathtubs, the carbon monoxide, the fall from a window. I have held in me the urge for an ending alongside the urge for redemption. See, everything is about the story you tell about it. I was not choosing between life and death. I was choosing what story would ring truest for who I was.
In the end, I chose the redemption arc, which I managed for some time. Now I’m choosing the cliff. I want to end the story without ending my life.
*
Things that kept me alive:
My fear of heights
My fear of pain
My fear of hurting my father
My desire to prove myself wrong
My narcissistic investment in my narrative
My longing for love
*
Know that whatever it is that you’re recalling is over. A thought is vivid, immersive, and addicting. The world where you speak and act takes practice. That’s why most people can’t or won’t do it. It’s exhausting. I didn’t do it for a while. And now I do it. If you didn’t have anyone to teach you how, it takes much longer. It took me 20 years, since I was in primary school, when the first blow landed not on me but on her. I was a child watching a horrible illusion in my home. It was my first encounter with something that resembled theatre. As in, it was the first time something occurred in close proximity that felt strangely elevated, and where I was relegated the role of an observer to drastic events I could take no action on. I couldn’t even speak, because in the theatre the audience is expected to be quiet. I registered what I saw as a performance separate from me. I accidentally assigned myself a long-term helplessness.
*
I’ve been trying not to anticipate myself. To not say I will do this and that. But to observe myself with patience. Patience takes real love, you know. Not only love of the thing that needs time, but also love of time itself. That is, accepting its finiteness, while enjoying its endless passing. Time is often positioned as an antagonist, because we’ve made it a brutal whip-holding landlord of our lives. Time, in essence, is a woman walking the perimeter of a lake. You take a boat out to relish her company, and to let her position around you guide your intuition about what needs to be done.
