SUICIDE IS PAINLESS

I wrote this true story at age 17 and then 21. A few months after I attempted again. I am now 34. I am not one to say things get better, because they have not for me, but never lose hope or faith that one day life can be beautiful….

I sit here now, looking back four years ago, wondering where I’ve come to. I realise I haven’t got anywhere. I’m still stuck at the crossroads between living and dying. Except now I can add a few more words to my list of expertise: suicide, criminal, and junkie. I’ve dissolved the line between wrong and right and I can no longer remember which is which. I recall my mother saying to me last night over dinner, “I’d rather you sell yourself than steal off your family” and realise how low I’ve turned out to be just to support my habit. I remember at the start of this ordeal thinking that if it ever came to the point of having to sell myself or deal drugs just to survive I would rather commit suicide. Well it’s come to that point in time and I’m stuck, just like I was when I was sixteen, and I haven’t moved anywhere.

Sitting on my desk was a book, or a manual, entitled “The Final Exit: A Guide to Self Deliverance.” This was my bible, suicide was my religion. 
Obsessively I flipped the pages, making notes on lethal doses of medications I could easily acquire. When I had narrowed the list down to what I deemed the most effective way to end my life, I took my notes and headed to the room in my house which had become my temple. Searching frantically through the boxes of pills, I carefully counted out one hundred valiums and put them in the new bag I had received from my auntie as a present. It had never been used, it only had one purpose. I went downstairs to the alcohol cabinet and stole a bottle of vodka, which I’d never had a taste of. I crushed up twenty of the tablets, carefully following the instructions from the voice in my head, and mixed them with the alcohol. I put the bag, my Messiah, under my bed and headed downstairs for dinner. Laughing hysterically at all that was said, I was beaming with happiness for the first time in years. I felt elated, like I was on the most magical drug of the all. After dinner I went to sleep, anxious for the next day, my last, to arrive. Suicide was my opiate, and the time had finally come. I went to school that day per normal, the only thing differing was the bright bag with the mushroom on it sitting deep within my school bah. Stepping off the morning 624 bus, I walked quickly away from my brother and friend, eager to go to class and get marked present for the day. Sitting at my desk, the usual whirlwind of useless conversation and gossip swirled around me, but I was completely absorbed within myself. I neither felt happy nor sad, just completely numb and dissociated from reality. I spent the lesson tapping my foot impatiently and playing with the pills at the bottom of my bag. I toyed with the idea of returning home and leaving a note, but decided against it in case my parents went searching for me. The bell went for recess and I jumped up with my new bag, rushing past everyone, avoiding eye contact. I had already said my goodbyes. I left the school grounds and wandered aimlessly for two hours. I ended up trailing down Gardiners’ Creek, a few kilometres from where I lived. I spotted a hidden drainpipe with water flowing from it into the creek. Acknowledging that it was probably a muddy sewer, I knew the likelihood of being rescued was minimal. I climber into the foul smelling pipe and crawled about five meters deep into it. I contemplated graffitiing “Cassie Szer 1982–1998” on the wall of the pipe, but the voice took over my thoughts and sent my hand spiralling into my bag for my final treatment. Almost robotically I popped 80 pills, shoving handfuls of them into my mouth, and trying not to gag. When it came to the vodka though, the taste was so overwhelmingly disgusting that I couldn’t stomach it. Instead I lay down in the murky water preying desperately to make this work. I close my eyes and the universe turned in on itself as I lapsed into unconsciousness…

I woke up, alive. A week later. Fragment of memories flooded my brain. A girl. A little girl in the tunnel with me. An ambulance, and then now. A week gone from my mind. I was classified insane and thrown in the whirlpool known as the psychiatric hospital system in which I awoke to find myself listening to my friend on a strange blue phone I had never seen before. In hospital I indulged in my pain and was finally set free. The other lost souls that had been locked away from the world became the closest friends I ever had. I had felt so connected to a group of people in my life. here were my soul mates, people who understood and shared my pain. People you could be yourself around, let your make disappear and display your darkest emotions to. In here I was provoked and pushed to become ‘normal’, or happy, and pumped with drug after drug until I got better. But that never happened. I just sank deeper and deeper into the black hole I had created for myself and curled up in a ball and remained there. I was diagnosed with ‘treatment-resistant’ depression and sent to an adult hospital to have my brain probed and was given electric shocks. “To set the level of electricity in my brain back to normal” they said. It did wonders for my memory…

Now, almost 21, I sit. Staring statically at nothing in particular, I embrace the abstract concept of death, as I collapse into myself, again. I dream of a large vial of sodium cyanide resting comfortably next to my bed. I dream of sinking into oblivion, descending down spirals of emptiness and pain, until I hit the point of nothingness. Until I collide with non-existence. And in the precious moment there are no more lonely nights screaming silently in anguish. No more living behind a transmission barrier, isolating me from the rest of humanity. No more anything except an eternity inside the void of obscurity where reality was just an illusion. Just a floating memory.