July 2nd. 2020. 1.30am
I have been struggling with suicidal thoughts in varying degrees of severity for the last two weeks. Not only for the past two weeks, but thoughts that seemed to be a thing of the past have returned to whisper evil things in my ears when it’s cold outside and the house is quiet. When the cars have stopped moving and the children can’t be heard enjoying the neighboring gardens, it whispers.
In two days, on Saturday the 4th of July 2020 I am set to turn twenty-eight. This is a surprise to me. It is an age I never thought I would grow to see –and now, in the darkness turned Thursday I still wonder if I am ever going to make it-. Two days feels like a life time.
When I was younger I had an obsession (for want of a more apt phrase) with the ‘’twenty-seven club’. That band of misfit artists who never made it past the momentous age. Cobain, Winehouse, Hendrix, Morrison. I saw in them something of myself, the misunderstood creative who may someday find some common ground in death. Lacking any real friends until a later age and never -even to this day- fully understanding my own warped mind, I grew up to believe that I was destined for this path. I’d make something beautiful and bow out when the time came in a blaze of inept wonder.
That day nearly came short of my twenty-seventh birthday when I was hospitalized for alcoholism with liver damage; vomiting blood and shaking like a pope. When I came out of the hospital sober and found myself birthday bound with a new found lust for life I realized that entry to the club was not something I truly wanted. I wanted to live. Fast? Sure. But die young? Not a hope. Get old and grey with a love of my own and a white picket fence and maybe a dog or two and a great record collection to confuse the grand kids with. That was what I truly wanted. So I spent eight months working on myself to the best of my ability. I stayed dry (but for one night) and worked hard. I played less. I started smoking weed to sleep which turned out to be a huge mistake but as most mistakes are, it didn’t seem so at the time. I was getting fatter, gaining color, respect, friendship and prosperity in my job. Then the fear came. The anxiety crept in. The unshakable idea that some unstoppable force of irony would get me, just when I had decided that I didn’t wanna be got! The age was coming for me. Twenty-seven was going to get me. I’d sent in my application, interviewed for the job, done the work experience and all but signed the contract. I’d made a verbal agreement and come to a gentleman's understanding. Oh death. Oh death that lurks in the darkness, in the icy wind. Oh death; that final games of ski-ball on a closing pier, the final ride the final bell, the last call. Coming for me after all. After all I had done to turn it down. Now was the time. Oh death.
Then the world began to fall apart and that impending sense of ironic finality began to surround me. Communities ravaged by a plague that was getting closer and closer to my own door. Surely this was it? Surely this was my end game. Something I had always feared. A slow and painful death. What happened to leaving behind a beautiful corpse? Damn it to hell I’d not let it get me!
So after eight months I picked up the bottle; called in on my old familiar friend Jack. And I drank and I drank. I smoked and I took painkillers I didn’t need. Valium and weed. I took my death back into my own hands and I’d be damned if anything was going to stop me. But something did stop me. That sense of life I’d had a year ago in that hospital bed. The dogs and the fence and the records and the grey hairs. I had one final manic blow out of whiskey and cocaine and then decided to go cold turkey. That was five days ago. Now its two days until twenty-eight, the mystery year the one I never saw coming never planned for. The one I never had a road map to. I’d thrown out the guide, made all the wrong turns and here I am, somehow, just two streets away. And I find myself wondering if I really want it after all. Back and forth I play this game with myself. The plague is still worrying the world and on Saturday, the day I am to turn twenty-eight, my bar re-opens and I’m there on the front line dealing with the public. Those dirty bastards who refuse to wash their hands after they shit or sneeze in their palms. I find myself weak with withdrawal and unsteady with anxiety. I find myself overcome with depression and negative wonder. What does my future hold? More of the same? Working hard and failing at it all? Trying to make it as a writer but only ever really making it as a caged rat? A cog. Playing the game of life by their rules right up until the moment I’m truly honestly wonderfully content only for that same unstoppable force of ironic finality I have feared this past year to sweep me off my feet and fuck me out of existence?
Now I find myself on the precipice. I’m stood at the top of a high rise looking down with one voice telling me to jump and the other saying rest now, we can always jump tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes, and I’m starting to feel like my legs might be too heavy to make it down the stairs and into the crowded street only to climb back up again another day and have the same old argument with myself. I’m tired, and I have been struggling with suicidal thoughts in varying degrees of severity for the last two weeks.
-Walter Laurence, on turning twenty-eight.
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