"What were you looking for?" I ask.
"I... I wanted to by a knife," he says.
"In the mirror."
He says he doesn't know. He hasn't slept in 26 hours. It's been a couple of years, but we've had this phone call before. I'm tired and annoyed and I'm scared to be angry with him. he tells me that life is painful. That I must really hate him to want him to stay in so much pain. The way he describes pain, you would think he invented it.
"Have you been taking your medication?" I ask.
"What's the point?" he says.
"So you can live your life."
"What's the point of living my life," he asks.
"I know things have been rough lately," I try, "but it hasn't always been that way. It's hard to see it right now, but there is enough good possible to keep trying."
"But what's the point?" he asks.
I am fully aware that have been asked the meaning of life; a human life very possibly hangs on my answer. As any aspiring philosopher, I had hoped to confront the problem of suicide in the manner of the greats before me: from a comfortable life, the safe aesthetic distance and several levels of abstraction that insulates me from the subject allows me to view it with piercing objectivity. A single pithy-yet-elegant sentence would enamor students for centuries, though few would read my mutli-volume work (maybe Principia Philosophica?) posthumously inducted into the philosophical canon. In other words, I never meant to be tested with something so urgent, so physical and real.
I am not ready. I can't speak for Erick. I, too, have bumped up against the problem of suicide. I, at least, haver reasons to keep going:
- It's weird: I think Cougar Town is good enough to marathon watch on my phone, but not good enough to make my girlfriend watch on a normal TV. Maybe that’s an issue I’d like to stay alive to explore?
- There are going to be at least two more Avengers movies before everybody starts talking how old Robert Downey Jr. looks in 3D.
- Think of all the advantages I've been given. Look at me: I have extremely supportive parents, the chilliest of girlfriends, an IPhone that streams Cougar Town for free, and I seem to get more handsome every single day. It would be an insult to ordinary people if I killed myself anytime soon.
I'm sure Erick has his reasons to.
So instead of answering him, I biked to his house and threatened to call the cops if he mentioned suicide again, told me to remember that he loved me, or spoke of himself in the past-tense again. I’ll spare you the agonizing details of the two hours that followed, but the medical costs of a two week stay in a mental institution turned out to be the deciding factor.
My friends--to sweet, sweet
deciding factors.
