There were almost 49,000 suicide deaths in the U.S. in 2024,
but that doesn’t seem to be making anything change,
and never will.
Gratefully, I don’t need suicide to feel like the difference,
and in fact,
all the cosmos ever demanded of me was that
I try to make a change happen,
but then leave the rest to what happens between
the dark matter of uncertainty
and my observance of a thing, which is really a kind of memory,
by basically trying to be like a star
through thinking myself brighter and more illuminated
than any version of me I can realistically be responsible for.
I remember a few years ago sitting in the cemetery for a while
in front of my family’s headstone
where there’s no more room for me underneath,
thinking to myself what if the hand of my father
shot up through the earth right now
and instead of running away, I pulled him out,
made him a seat in the grass and then asked him
how he could have threatened to kill himself all those times
when he’d done so much good in the world
and had been relied on,
and was thought so well of by so many people.
Well, in my usual turning ugly inside-out kind of way
I then imagined him saying to me how he just wished
people could have seen him for the flawed man he was
rather than the persona of perfect reassurance he portrayed,
and that to go through life invisible like that,
while it might have comforted countless others, hurt him
in ways he couldn’t touch, sort of like waking to realize
you’ve been a memory your whole life, and that suicide,
that final threat to make things change or else,
is really just an overwhelming impulse to feel like you’re here,
in your own shoes, grounded as the dirt is deep.
Other than the obvious cry for help,
why’d you threaten to kill yourself in front of me?
I asked my late and now imaginary zombie father
while listening to the cars drive down Fisherville Road
trying to get nowhere as efficiently as they could,
and reader, I know it’s not really him, and that this is just me
talking to myself again, but logic sometimes doesn’t
figure into why people make the decisions that they do, often,
and I’ve made a life of imagining others to be reasonable
in order to better understand myself, so permit me this fantasy.
I waited for my father’s voice inside mine to answer me
for a long time in the grass,
but it never did, at least not in any conventional way.
Then I got up and walked home and ordered a pizza
and sat down and ate it in front of the TV, when it
occurred to me, this is exactly how I remembered him,
and, despite his accolades,
what I believe he most loved doing.
Now, thanks in part to my father,
I’m just trying to really magnify being ordinary
and alive, to demand from myself
I find everything I am and can be in a slice of Hawaiian,
and yeah, I’m trying to make sure
I don’t live the way my father did, but while also garnering
through all those times he tried to love me,
how observable effort was all we ever really needed
from one another.
Since even before his death I think,
I’ve been trying to generate a world
where success is a kind of failure, and where effort
and the privilege of being able to identify some,
is an end to itself, regardless of the outcome. I just have to
disappoint or disgust every part of me first to
make my mind shut up and start listening
for signs of kindness,
I just have to learn how to die without dying.