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The Sound of Suicide

Ciara M. Blecka

    The mania had passed. I had been delusional and suffered hallucinations for about a week but at least I didn’t embarrass myself as badly this time. My control over the heightened sense of grandeur seemed to be more extensive. It didn’t stop me from blowing all my money, though. At least that was the most harmless thing I could’ve done. People were saying behind my back “she sounds sick in the head” again. How could I let insults like that cut me? They used to, before. I used to hardly have the will to face people ever again once they’d seen me manic. Not anymore. Not after what I’d been through all these years. Not after the emotional damage I’d suffered at the hands of other mentally ill people. And yet everything could seem so normal. It was an eternal mindfuck tolerating someone who was mentally ill and I knew it so I didn’t blame them for what they said about me. The waters could be calm and still and easy and then in the next instant there was a maelstrom.
    And I wasn’t sure what was worse: the mania or the depression. Mania was bombastic and a vile tornado that destroyed everything in its wake, but depression was insidious and dark and left a trail of rotten decay. Maybe I had gotten some semblance of control over the mania, but the depression was burying me alive. I was murderous and suicidal when depression curled its fingers around my throat and now I was on the maximum dose of two mood stabilizers and I wondered what was going to happen when there wasn’t enough medicine in the world.
    I bought a package of the cheapest razors because they were the easiest to disassemble and take out the blades. I hadn’t cut myself in over a decade but the lure of the fresh blood running down my arm was enough to coax me back into the shallow parting of the flesh on my forearm. They could say cutting was a sickness, but the sanguine rivulets that clotted and dried to a rust-coloured crust were the only distraction from the pain. And there was something like passion in the mock violence.
    I didn’t cry. How could I? Was there anything else but a numb disgust that fell over my psyche like a weighted blanket? I found the whiny mewling of other supposedly suicidal people grating on my nerves. They would constantly beg for attention from anyone and everyone, parading their sickness around like it was a trophy they had won in a competition. If they were hanging from a ledge I would push them off rather than get dragged down with them. My suicide would be a mystery; I would leave no trace behind.
    My roommate laid down on the floor. “I feel wretched,” she said. “I’m not waving but drowning.”
    I started playing black metal but there wasn’t enough rage in it. It seemed to lack the emotion I was looking for. I tried My Dying Bride but they were too melancholy for the state of mind I was in. I settled on Slipknot and finally felt appeased.
    “I’m going to disappear,” I told her.
    “I’ll be dead by then,” she promised me.
    “Then die,” I said. I would’ve grabbed the kitchen knife and done the job myself but polite society frowned upon that sort of thing.
    “I feel so inferior,” she went on. “My boobs are too small and every other girl I know is blessed with naturally voluptuous tits or they’ve had work done.”
    Yesterday I’d had to listen to her talk about how she was corseting again and then she’d say she was going to drop ten pounds fast but without purging for five days—she’d do it the healthy way. Well, of course. I lit a cigarette and sat down at the table. Some days I wondered why I had never had any friends and never would yet she was so popular.
    “I have an overwhelming need to watch porn,” she said and rolled over onto her back, her model’s body in a heap on the floor, limbs askew like a broken doll.
    I just couldn’t bring myself to waste the mental space on my body anymore. I was exhausted. I wasn’t paying society’s tolls anymore. I would take the road untraveled. Even if that meant driving alone.
    Mason walked in without bothering to knock. We were all single, but yet Jessica had claimed him and every man we knew. She suddenly came alive at his mere presence, a bubbling bouncing font of vivacity. Gone were her declarations of malaise like a mote of dust floating away in the breeze.
    “How have you girls been?” he asked.
    “Good,” I said. Did it matter?
    “Things have been rough for me,” he admitted. “It’s the anniversary of my dad’s death and my mom is taking it rough. And, you know, it’s always easier to focus on the negatives. There’s so many more of them.”
    No one had anything to say to that. Jessica went on to flirt and pose for Mason until he was gone and then she was back to being her deflated neurotic self. When people made me too sick to cope and I found myself drowning in all the aggressive misogynistic metal, I thought about a term I’d once heard: audio drugs. What we think is what we are and what we hear informs what we think. It was time to come up for air.
    I decided to disappear like I said I was going to. At least for a day. And while I was removed from the barrage of mental mayhem emanating off of the general populace, I meditated to endless tracks of gentle Indian folk music. I looked inside my own mind instead of being buried in the avalanche of other people’s. And what I found there was peace. It was the enduring philosophy that Oscar Wilde had so poignantly declared: whatever is popular is wrong.

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