The Immortal Complex
Atticus S. Emerson
Chapter One
As far as I can remember I’ve died about fifty-seven times. Cause of death: self inflicted gunshot wound to the head, thirty-eight times. Lept to death from varying heights, twelve times. Self inflicted wounds to the left and right wrist, and I do not recommend this, one time. Carbon-monoxide poisoning, sixteen times. Which is the easiest of all the aforementioned ways to kill yourself. It is simple and pain free. All you do is go to sleep.
The next day, always the next day, fifty-seven times now, as far as I can remember, I wake up. Most of the time I’m in my own bed, other times I might wake up in a nice four-star hotel in some city that’s halfway across the country. I could wake up in Chicago or Denver, L.A. or N.Y. City. It’s all a part of my job. I’m out of town almost every week.
So far I’ve managed to kill myself every day for the past two months. Not only have I always woken up alive the next day, but it’s as if I had gone on living like I never killed myself. Like I just went on being a productive little cog. All of my work gets done, all of my errands, everything. I can recall it all the next day like I had lived through every waking moment, only I didn’t.
I wasn’t at my big company meeting last Monday, but I wrote a report, presented it, and got a promotion for it, apparently. Apparently I attended my cousin's wedding, took my kids to an amusement park,beat my boss in a game of golf, flew to New York, flew home, flew to Chicago, flew home, moved out of my house, signed the divorce papers. I did all of those thing, only I didn’t.
The reason I say “as far as I can remember” is because sometimes I’m not sure if I’ve killed myself, or if I simply dreamt the whole thing up. I remember every single detail of every single death I’ve suffered at my own hands. If they are just dreams they are the most vivid I’ve ever had. The first time I managed to kill myself was the night that my wife confessed to me that she had wanted a divorce. I went to a friend’s house and told him all about it. Both of us consumed quite a large amount of alcohol that night. He finally went off to bed and I went to my car where I keep my gun. The rest seems pretty obvious.
I woke up the next day on his couch. It seemed like such a vivid dream that I ran outside to my car half dressed. There was no blood, no marks on my face where the bullet would have gone through, nothing to suggest that it was anything more than a horrible dream. Except, when I pulled the gun out of the glovebox of my car. I pulled out the magazine which houses fifteen rounds to discover that one round was missing. I counted and counted again, but there were only fourteen bullets.
I got myself drunk again the next night at a motel with my pistol by my night stand. I checked the magazine, fourteen bullets, and then I shot myself again. The next day I woke up in the motel, but this time there were two rounds missing. I was still very much alive. Again there was no mess, no blood, no scars. I did this over and over again with three rounds missing, four, five, and so on. Thirty-eight times I had been through this process. I kept killing myself partly because I couldn’t believe that this was happening, but mostly because I really wanted to die. I thought my life would be over without my wife. I thought that she was going to take everything from me.
My two sons had no idea what was going on between their mother and father. I had been keeping up appearances at the house while I was dead. I had driven them to school and hugged them both, like I was some sort of ghost. We never really sat down to talk to them about it, and it’s a conversation that I am dreading. Right now the papers are signed and the custody hearing is under way, and we’re going to have to talk to them sooner rather than later. It’s something that I can take care of when I’m dead.
Once everything was signed I went out and bought the biggest television, all the new game systems, had a great big pool put in the back, a full sized basketball court. I bought a great big house with a great big yard. Becca no longer loved me. She got the old house and great big alimony checks. It was the only way she would let me have joint custody over the kids. She was holding our children for ransom. So I decided that I would give my kids everything they wanted and more.
I wasn’t exactly trying to buy their affection, but when you give a child whatever they want they tend to say ‘I love you’ more. The pay increase and bonus that I received was big enough to make you sick. I never thought I would see that kind of money in my lifetime. I work for a large pharmaceutical company as a rep. I was making decent money and traveling all the time. My job was to attend various conferences on new drugs and report back to the company. They decide what drugs to create, buy, or sell, and then I would go out and sell them to big time clients and hospitals around the country. I never lost a sale.
With the raise and bonus I am now one of the people in charge of expanding our clientele. Growing our company and leaving our competition in the dust. I decide what compounds of drugs we should be endorsing while keeping up with current research and breakthroughs. When the market would change I would be on top of it, deciding if we needed to drop a drug because the profit might not outweigh the cost of lawsuits against us. The drugs were usually cheap to make and they were meant to be prescribed for people facing chronic illness. Chronic illness meant a steady revenue. There was never really anything meant to cure someone. The only cure I could think of was a bullet to the head, but even that turned out to be a dead end for me.
So far I’ve only killed myself in four different ways, and that’s because I’m afraid of fudging something up. It may sound funny but there are worse things than death. Plus I’m not entirely sure what the rules to my immortality might be. This whole thing, for me, has been less about death and more about not living. That is to say, I get such anxiety about things that I would rather kill myself then do something that tied me up in knots. So I’m not entirely focused on the variety that might come with this territory I’ve acquired.
The only thing I was really curious about was jumping to my death. I was a quick but exhilarating ride that ended way too soon. Just jump then, ‘Splat!’ I wake up in bed well rested and refreshed. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever slept so well. I jumped out of my new office at work and plummeted about thirty stories. The tugging at my stomach and the rush of adrenaline I got was well worth it. Thirty stories down, splat, and still my alarm goes off the next day. Right now I’m saving up the courage to go skydiving, only I plan to cut my chute, and my back up. I’m really not up to it yet, but it’s certainly something I’m looking forward to doing.
Mostly I guess I’m afraid of what happens if I try to kill myself and I’m not completely successful. If I survive do I have to live with whatever disfigurement might ail me? I mean what if I wake up one day and I’m on life support because I did a botched job? I just don’t want to do anything that’s going to screw up the way my life is going right now. The fact that I’ve been so successful at a job that I really can’t stand. The memories of the smiles on my kids faces when they come home and see I’ve bought them the latest transformer toy. Right now my kids are all I have, and I’m so married to this new job that I really only have time for those two things.
The real reason I’m so terrified of becoming something along the lines of a vegetable is because of the time that I tried to cut my wrists. Once again it is not something that I would recommend. It is a terrible way to try and kill yourself for several reasons. One, I’m assuming I did something wrong because it took forever for me to die. The blood wasn’t draining fast enough or something. I was basically succeeding at making my brand new bathroom a bloody mess. I bought a straight razor and took it right out of it’s package. So it was plenty sharp. In fact, the cutting part was relatively painless. In retrospect I made a ton of mistakes when slitting my wrist.
The first was that I cut them across not down the forearm and toward myself. The second was that I cut my left wrist with my right hand, and I cut it a little too much. I cut the tendons in my wrist, and when I went to put the razor in my left hand I dropped it. So I start bleeding out and blood starts getting all over my bathroom floor and it’s all slippery, sticky, and red. My black and white marbled floor now black and with red smears showing only on the white tile.
The razor had slid down and under my clawfoot tub to where I could barely reach. I got down on my knees holding my left arm against my body and reaching under the tub with my right arm. Now my head is on the floor with my ear pressed against the wet sticky surface, and I’m covered in my own blood. I finally slide the razor out from the tub and I grabbed it with my good hand. I sat with my back leaning against the tub, exhausted from the struggle. That’s when I really started to get dizzy, light headed, and sick to my stomach. The nausea was something I hadn’t really been planning on. So I threw my breakfast up in my brand new tub.
While I sat there trying to compose myself I had time to reflect upon the moment. I thought about what a shit job I was doing at killing myself this time after I had seemingly mastered the task. I thought about whether I could continue through with it. I didn’t think I would make it to my nightstand to grab my other pistol. I would have to finish the job in here, in this bathroom, with this razor. I looked around at the mess and thought about how I definitely didn’t want to clean up this bloodied floor.
I was worried about having to call an ambulance and wait for them to bust down my beautiful Dark Oak door. Then come in to find me here with the razor blade still in my hand. They would have to take me to the hospital where I would have to sit in a room. I would have to wait for surgery with some strange old women keeping an eye on me because they’re afraid I’d try and kill myself again. Then I’d have to explain this all to my kids, and I’ll wish I was dead for that conversation too.
I come out of my little daydream and my vision is starting to get a little blurry, and I’m starting to get tunnel vision. So I took the razor that was still in my right hand, and I stick one end in between my teeth and bite down so the razor is firmly in place. Then I took my right wrist and pressed it against the razor. Taking a deep breath I quickly jerked my wrist across the blade. I spit the razor out and fell into a puddle of blood with a wet ‘thunk’. I held up my right arm to examine the cut I made and I felt the warm blood flow down my arm which was riddled with pins and needles. After a few more passing moments I finally slipped away.
When I woke up to the next day I ran right to my toilet and threw up all over again. The razor was still lying on the floor of my bathroom. I wiped my mouth with some toilet paper and looked at the blade. It was just sitting there in the middle of my clean bathroom floor. There’s usually never any mess but here the razor blade was, sitting right where I left it. That’s when I decided that I had to be more careful with the way I killed myself. I wanted my death to be a pleasurable experience if not a quick and painless one. I also thought that poisons and pills should be taken off as a means of death because they weren’t reliable enough.
Besides that the only reason I had thought to slit my wrist was because I didn’t want to have to go out buying bullets every week. I thought that it might start to look weird if I came in every couple of weeks to buy a clip, and it would be worse if I just stockpiled them. I just figured I’d be well off finding alternative ways to killing myself. God forbid I get bored of shooting myself in the head. I can’t afford to get sloppy and make a mistake and wind up in a coma or something.
As I said before I’m not sure what the rules to my so called immortality are. I don’t know how any of this works really, and most of the things that are happening hardly make any sense to me. I only found out that I can’t die through a rather happy accident followed by morbid curiosity. Finally I’ve come to accept it more as an escape from this reality that I’ve been living in. A way to get out of yardwork, out of arguments I didn’t want to have, meetings I didn’t want to go to, or weddings I didn’t want to attend.
Every day there’s always something that I don’t feel like dealing with. There’s always something coming around the corner that makes me so anxious that I’d rather not deal with the situation. I’ll just sit in my car in the morning thinking about everything that I have to do for the day. One day I sat in there so long that I fell asleep. Of course I woke up the next day in the comfort of my bed. It was another happy accident. A nice easy way to do things, sit, wait, fall asleep, and wake up again.
Another thing that I find strange is that I don’t dream anymore. Once the deed is done I wake straight back up. There’s barely even a millisecond between the moment that I die and the moment that I wake up. As far as my perception of the experience goes. Exactly like when you sleep, only I never ever dream once dead. Unless you count when I scroll through the memories of my “day”. Then I guess you could say that it’s more like I’ve been living in a dream. My few hours of actual awareness only take place when I get up out of bed, take my shower and have breakfast. In spite of everything, I guess, I can’t seem to break out of my morning routine.
It’s just as well that I don’t dream, because I don’t have to be haunted by the past. As a kid dreams are either happy or terrifying. You just wake up and go about your day or you wake up bawling your eyes out for some upsetting reason you can never articulate as a child. As we age though, our dreams become heavy and burdened through tireless experiences. It’s wears us out and it shows through our dreams. Our stress manifest itself as the failures of our past coming back to haunt us. We wake up sad, we wake up exhausted, we wake up regardless. It becomes a physical burden as we carry it around from day to day. Dreams are just how the stress from our lives is processed.
Now I can forego the heartbreak of lovers past, or depression from reliving the death of a friend I had lost long ago. To be honest I really am grateful for the fact that I don’t dream anymore. I can scroll through the day and then I don’t have to think about it anymore. Although lately things have been going very well for me. Like the fact that the divorce had gone quite smoothly, or that I have been doing great at work. I mean, I’ve done a fantastic job of living my life without my help. It’s funny when you think about it, it brings a whole new meaning to the saying “better off dead”.
To be completely honest and open with you for a minute, the truth of the matter is that I am completely terrified of the thought of death or dying. I mean dying for real. You know, when that really is the end and everything stays dark. Now I am complete terrified at the thought of living. Who knows, maybe it’s the terror of actually dying that has been keeping me alive? The whole mystery to this phenomenon is way beyond me. I mean, I have ruled out most of the obvious things. I don’t think it could be any sort of superpower that I have. After cutting my wrists I can definitively say that I don’t heal from my wounds. On top of that healing my body wouldn’t mean that the mess from blowing my brains out could just disappear
No, there has got to be something else behind this whole ordeal. It’s more like I am resetting my life every day. Not just resetting my life but waking up with fresh new memories. I remember everything that I did while I was killing myself, but the mess is always gone the next day. Even the bullets are gone from the gun. Where do they go? Meanwhile the razor that I used stayed on the floor of my bathroom. It’s difficult to make any sense of what is happening to me when things seem to contradict one another. One object stays and another disappears without a trace.
I guess no matter what I do the bigger picture is going to remain out of reach to me. No matter how hard I look or how much I hypothesize things will never become clear to me. It’s gotten to the point where I just have to accept it as a reality in my life. I just have to let my life run it’s own course without thinking about it too much. Over thinking things always leads to unnecessary stress, but I’m just not sure what course I want my life to take.
After two months of offing myself I’ve barely done any living of my own. The two months were like a very long vacation that took place in a very short amount of time. Most days there wasn’t more than two or three hours between me getting up and me biting the bullet. I’ve literally been getting up to make coffee, sit down and eat my breakfast, and then go kill myself. I mean it’s good that I don’t get right up and kill myself. It gives me a little time to process things. It’s not like I have a problem.
It’s just that, once you’ve died and come back, life seems to lose a lot of it’s luster. The thing happens, Bam! Splat! and then I’m just safe in my bed? Give me fire! Give me brimstone! Show me the pearly gates, show me something for Christ’s sake! You put in all this effort to life and you’d think that maybe the end could just be the goddamn end sometimes. None of this waking up refreshed and well rested bullcrap. This just gets to be mentally exhausting after a while I guess. I haven’t really had time to think about the effects this might be having on me.
I really need to take a break from killing myself and spend some more time with my kids. I mean some real time with my kids and not this false memory bullshit. That’s definitely what I should be focusing on out of everything. Spend some down to earth time with Tommy and Doug, my two beautiful sons. I can see where this whole thing is going, and I won’t let it get to that point. I’m not going to miss watching my two kids grow up with these very eyes. I want to actually be there for every moment of their life, even if they don’t seem like important moments, they all are. My sons!
The more I think about it the more clearly I can see how killing myself has just become some drug to me. Only it’s better than any drug that I could possibly think of. All the memories come over me like some kind of flash hallucination. It’s a rush when I download the memories of my day, it’s addictive. The act of killing myself has even started to turn into a thrill. Just jumping off a building can be so exhilarating that I’ll get up and do it a few days in a row. Just sitting in my car waiting to fall asleep is the most relaxed I’ve ever felt. If I could bottle all of these sensations into one pill I would make a fortune in the drug industry.
Killing myself again and again, it takes me out of my life and away from my responsibilities. It delivers me to a state of satisfaction and bliss which encompasses my entire life. It’s a cheap and effective way for me to get high, and the best part is that no one knows about it but me. There is no one who could tell me to stop. There is no way anyone would notice that I was missing.
I have stumbled upon the ultimate escape from life, and it’s death, but not in the way that you could have ever imagined. I probably won’t even have a problem kicking the habit. It’s not like I need help or anything. Even if I did, it’s not like there is some sort of a support group out there for people like me, right? Right?
Chapter Two
“Hi I’m Jerry, and I’ve died somewhere around six hundred times. Really I’ve lost track though.”
“Hi Jerry” the group responded in mono-toned unison. The group which consisted of fourteen of us, including myself. There are two women and twelve men sitting in a circle in the basement of the Mangrove Rec Center. I suspect that there are grossly more men at this meeting than women due to the fact that suicide is a problem that mostly affects men. I don’t mean to sound sexist, but most women aren’t good at such things.
I mean, it’s not like women don’t give it their best shot; there are plenty of women who have tried to off themselves, probably just as many as men. The difference is that women aren’t successful, and they set themselves up for failure. Swallowing pills is the most popular way among women who try to kill themselves. The problem is that it leaves time for people to come and find you sick and writhing on the floor or in the bathtub and then it becomes an expensive trip to the hospital where they pump your stomach until the pills pop back out.
Men tend to be more straight forward about killing themselves and they do something like shoot themselves. Though believe me there are ways to screw that up too. One time I had the gun in my mouth and I shanked it to the left a little bit and blew a hole through my jaw bone back by my ear. I dropped the gun and I couldn’t hear a damned thing. I burnt my tongue and my lips, and my mouth tasted like blood, smoke, and burnt skin. I screamed so loud that my vocal chords burst. After what seemed like an eternity of agony I regained the hearing in my right ear only to hear banging on the motel room door. I scrambled on the floor and grabbed the gun, and then I popped another bullet through my temple.
The point is that men have a higher success rate than women, again, nothing sexist, just facts. Besides, it’s not something that anyone should want to stand and argue about. People don’t argue over which of them is the more awful human being. You don’t see campaign ads where a senator tells you all the terrible things they’ve done. No company will tell you how their product is bad for you and still try to sell it to you. So why would anyone advocate that women are just as good at killing themselves? Even at the meetings we have, people don’t just brag about the different ways they’ve gone and killed themselves. I mean it comes up from time to time, but it’s not something that any one of us is proud of. It’s more like we’re talking about our lowest moments, the worse of our addiction.
Jerry continues to talking to the group, the thirteen of us, not including Jerry.
“. . . and when I wake up the next day I’m not sure if it really happened. When I wake up tomorrow, how will I even know that I was at this meeting today? I mean what if I killed myself this morning?That would make for six-hundred and one.”
He seems like he’s losing track of reality, something everyone in this room is familiar with. When life is like a dream and your death seems so real, who wouldn’t lose their mind? Wait, he’s killed himself six-hundred and one times? No one in our group has killed themselves that many times. That means this young kid has been killing himself for almost two years straight. He looks like he’s hardly even eighteen. To be so young and have to deal with this type of a problem, I can’t begin to imagine. I sit up in my seat and lean forward as I actually listen to what he’s saying.
Jerry began to speak in somewhat of a slow panic, “I’m not sure if this is something that I can beat. I just keep waking up day after day to find that I’m just a little older than the day before, and it’s really starting to scare me.” A little chill runs up my spine, up the spine of everyone who’s listening. We are all really terrified of our addiction, it’s just that none of us can really help it.
“ I don’t even know how I’m suppose to go about living my life right now. Things seem like they’re great in ‘real’ life, and I’m afraid I will throw that all away if I actually start living for myself.” This is a true sign of the addiction that plagues all of us. For some reason each of our lives started going swimmingly since the day we first killed ourselves. All of us had brought up these exact same feelings on our first day. Jerry was definitely no different than any of us.
Everyone in this room had tried to kill themselves only to find that things got better soon after. They always got better and dying over it had done nothing for them. We all wound up being far more successful than we had ever dreamed. Now the fear of losing everything that we’ve “worked” for is what drives us to continue killing ourselves. It’s kind of funny, we were actually killing ourselves for the sake of success. Working ourselves to death, so to say.
Always, people had said that they would be able to stop killing themselves when they felt that they and their families could live and retired happy and safe somewhere, but when would that day ever come? Something would always come up in our lives, something that would keep us fixed in our new way of “life”. Someone would become a grandparent or have another kid and then the added pressure of another mouth to feed causes them to trigger. Losing your job, losing a loved one, the end of a relationship, they were all reasons to trigger. All things that would eventually heal themselves with time.
The kid who’s talking right now, Jerry, was a brand new member. This was his first time in group so he had to state his name and the number of times he could remember killing himself. Then he was allowed to have the floor for as long as he needed. The past few meetings had been filled with new members who basically said the same thing as the person from the week before. However, Jerry seemed to be the one with the worst case of addiction. Everything he said was more gripping even though I had heard most of these things before.
The fact was that Jerry couldn’t have killed himself this morning, because he wouldn’t have made it to the meeting otherwise. To be here for the first time is a test designed by the leader of our group. The fact was though, that Jerry was the only person that had to actually be here. For the rest of us this had been become a part of a routine, a reprogramming. Here in the space where we’re suppose to be supporting each other, there’s no telling who was actually present and who was phoning it in. It could be that everyone is present, but I had my suspicions.
The first meeting is one thing, it’s a step in the direction we were all hoping to go in, but now I wonder if this is just a futile attempt to get better. The more I think about it the less convinced I am that I want to get better. Then sitting here and listening to Jerry talk about his struggles, our struggles, I think that maybe I’m on the verge of some progress. There’s no way I can know if it’s working until the day where I know I’m healed. Or a day comes and I don’t wake up any more. One day my number might be up and that could just be the end of me. No more addiction, no more memories to scroll through, no more waking world.
Jerry finished speaking and the meeting was only half way over. He had cut himself off and just sat down quietly. Like he suddenly had an idea that he would have to sit and contemplate. Or maybe he just realized that this was the first time in two years he hadn’t killed himself. At some point everyone notes the accomplishment. We break out of our habit and we see for the first time that we are not stuck in some cycle. There is a way to break out of it and continue on with our lives. If we so choose.
After Jerry finished a middle aged women, wearing a bright pink business suit, stood up to his left and began to speak. “Hello all” she said with a slight twang in her voice. “My name is Kristine and I’m a recovering suicide addict.” She looked down at her feet like she was still a little uncomfortable saying those words. Like they still didn’t feel real to her. “I’m now a recovering ‘weekender’,” she said, actually motioning the quotes with her fingers.
A week “ender” is exactly what it sounds like. Someone who lives for the weekend! That is to say that these few people have learned to curb their addiction and enjoy their success. It was really the only progressive step that came after attending the first meeting. No one was even close to giving this up. For me, at least, I show up to remind myself that I am not going crazy. That I’m not losing my mind and all of this is actually happening. It is certainly an easy thing to lose sight of, and I’m pretty sure the same thing goes for most of the people sitting here today.
The “steps” before becoming a week “ender” are not difficult, unless of course your suicide was triggered by the “Holiday Blues”. We adopted the simple motto of ‘One day at a time’, starting with holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and the like. It’s morbidly ironic in my opinion, since “One day at a time” is the rate at which we’re able to kill ourselves. We can only ever take things one day at a time any which way you chose to look at things.
So here stands this country girl who couldn’t make it in the city, Kristine, who had learned to control her urge, her impulse, to kill herself every day, good for her. She’s just going on about all the stupid shit she and her friends plan to do for the next weekend, and how she can’t wait for her next white water rafting trip, or weekend in Paris that’s coming up. It just proves my point that there is no cure for us. Who could give this up?
Tonight is only my fifth meeting, so I guess I’m just being pessimistic. I’m clearly no where near the week-ender phase of things. Who knows? There might be hope for me yet! After all, this whole group was the brainchild of a current week-ender. The way this whole thing was set up was pretty ingenious of him.
We are set to meet on Sunday nights at eight o’ clock. Because if we want to actually make it to the meeting, the first meeting, we have to make it through the whole day without killing ourselves. If it’s not part of our routine we won’t do something out of the parameters of our typical day. I figured this out because I didn’t make it to the meeting the first time I was suppose to go. Instead of stepping on the train at seven-thirty, I stepped in front.
This is how I know that Jerry is actually here tonight, not logged out or anything, because otherwise he would physically not be here. Simple. Only once it becomes routine you can check out just like any other day. My new friend Walter admitted to me that sometimes he checks out on meeting days. At any rate, we had all attended at least one meeting. Progress!
The only person that has actually been present for every meeting is the founder, Dennis Foster. Dennis was a successful psychologist, he said all the right things to everyone that ever came to see him, and for his daily sacrifice he would help dozens of people a day. Because of his background in psychology he became self-aware of his addiction and was able to take steps on his own. If it weren’t for him none of us would be here today, and by that I mean in this room. He hadn’t exactly saved anyone yet.
He insisted that we all called him Dennis and not Dr. Foster. Though we had a medical doctor in the group who preferred we called him Dr. Thatcher. People and their particularities. The good Dr. Foster, Dennis, had decided to put an ad in the city paper. Every day he would run an ad that said:
A support group for those dealing with Death and Dying will be
forming at the Mangrove Community Rec Center. This week’s topic: Suicide. For more information call Dennis at 545-569-7353
I had tried to quit killing myself cold turkey after I temporarily lost my mind. I mean who wouldn’t lose their mind? This whole thing is nothing but psychotic. A twisted fucking mess. People go insane when they can’t comprehend reality, and there is no part of this occurrence that feels like it could be based in reality.
While going cold turkey I came across this ad in the morning. The first time I read it I didn’t think anything of it, and I had, in fact, done my best to put the whole thing behind me. Only it was still there, I could hear this voice inside of me simply telling me to do it, to kill myself, to be done with this day, and go on to the next.
I kept seeing the ad though, four days in a row, and I began thinking how strange it was. It felt like the ad was speaking directly to me. Dealing with death and dying, suicide, it seemed so strange for them to announce a topic. By Monday the ad had ran for over a week, and the topic was still stated to be suicide. Possibly an error? Why would they have the same topic two weeks in a row? So I called.
The line picked up but there was no greeting, just silence, and after a few seconds I said, “Um, hello, I’m not sure if this is the right number, but I’m calling about the group on death and dying.”
“Have you recently lost someone?” Dennis had said in his deep and calming demeanor.
“Well, no.” I replied, “but I was wondering why your topic has been suicide two weeks in a row. I keep seeing your ad in the paper.”
“Call back next week.”
“But-” the phone had gone dead.
I didn’t bother calling him back right away. Instead I went up to my room where I kept my six shooter, and I sat on the bed, as I often do, contemplating things. It’s like I always think clearly with a gun in my hand. I could feel that anxiety pulling at me. Why does he want me to call back next week? Why can’t he just explain it to me right now? Not knowing things is a major source of my stress, and it’s the main reason I trigger. Curiosity killed the cat, as well as myself, many times over.