Noticed in Committing

At first, I came up with basics: wrist slashing, hanging, overdose, jumping off a building, and stepping off in front of bus.  They were all very mundane, really, and if not done properly you just end up living very, very painfully.  It was after those routine ways to snuff oneself that I began to get creative.

There was going into a biker bar nude and starting fights with drunk bikers.  And when I say "fights", I mean with a knife in my hand.  That was a fun night.  Everyone was freaked out and angry at the same time.  They all wanted to kill me, but they didn't want to touch me either.  Eventually, though, they did.

Oh, another good one was sneaking into one of those giant dump trucks at a quarry and letting them dump tons of excavated rocks on me.  The driver of the loader always sees you just as it's too late and tries to stop the load.  His expression is priceless, and the pain lasts only seconds.  

Most spectacular was riding a motorcycle full speed up Pennsylvania Avenue, dodging the cement stanchions in the ground that stop car traffic on the 1600 block and riding helmet-less right into the fence around the White House.  That was damn spectacular.  The President wasn't home that day, but I got a few of those Secret Service jockeys to wet their britches.

Those were some good times.

But the truth of it all was that no matter how many ways of shuffling off the mortal coil I committed myself to, none of them made me feel any better.  In the end of each of those fantasies, I felt slightly sickened that this was what I fantasized about without any idea of why I did it.

So, much to my chagrin, my answer came to me in a cliché place: sitting, talking to a friend at coffee place.  At least this place had outdoor seating on the sidewalk.  If I'd been surrounded by baristas, earth-tone artwork and light jazz I think I would have died just on the inside.

We sat, Lenny and I, sipping hot cafe creations whose frou-frou names always slipped my mind, outside on a cold day and talked.

"Why do you want to be dead?" He always took me at the face value at which I presented myself to him.  He never lost his cool or told me I was crazy- even when he would have been perfectly right to do so.

"I don't want to be dead."

"Okay, so this whole thing with the suicides..." he motioned for me to continue his sentence.

"...is wanting to die, but not to be dead."

He looked at me for a me for a minute, taking two sips of his ultrafrappachinomochalattewhatever, and then he spoke. "So, you want the experience of dying, but you don't want to be dead.  Is that what you're saying?"

"Yeah, pretty much.  That sums it up."

He put down his drink, folded his arms and rested them on the table, "Okay.  I'll bite. Why?"

"Well, I figure that unless you've died, you can't really appreciate the value of life."

"Yeah, I guess that could be true.  But isn't there some other way since, technically, your method is pretty much impossible?"

"Not entirely impossible.  I could experience some kind of trauma, die on the operating table and be resuscitated."  I took a sip of my drink since I was starting to feel cold.

"Yeah, but what a risk.  Why not climb Everest or volunteer as Big Brother for an underprivileged youth?"

"It's not about achievement, Lenny.  It's not about helping others.  It's about me valuing my own existence and making the best of it for myself."

Lenny picked up his drink again, "Whatever you decide, you know?  It's your life.  I just think I'd rather not waste any time I have left in life trying to die.  It's a sin in some religions."

"I'm not trying to die, Lenny, I'm trying to live."

It shouldn't have been a surprise to me, then, that I died later that day.  

I had caught the subway out to where I lived and was walking up the sidewalk on 256th Street when I saw a guy on a bicycle heading towards me.  He saw me and I saw him.  I moved the right on sidewalk and he moved to his right. As he neared me, a sedan backed down a driveway seemingly out of nowhere.  His bike impacted the sedan, and he came flying upside down and ass-first over the car's trunk at me.  He was a big guy, and he came at me doing ten miles an hour or so.  When my head hit sidewalk, it was a quick, hard fall.

When I woke up in the hospital, which is where it appeared to me that I was at that moment, Lenny was reading a paper in a chair near my bed.  My head was fire, and I was bandaged and gowned.

He did not look up from the paper.  "Three minutes, twenty two seconds of you being dead and they were ready to call it.  Your head injury caused some sort of shock through your central nervous system and you eventually stopped breathing."