The Art of Dying

I wasn’t really trying to kill myself; I just wanted to see what it would feel like if I truly wanted to kill myself. I wanted to feel that despair, that hopelessness, that desire for something beyond a cruel life. I wanted to feel anything at all, and an act this desperate was my last attempt at eliciting a feeling, an emotion, something, anything at all.
I loved the dance that I choreographed prior to the final act, going through the formidable motions of discarding the anti-psychotics and anti-depressants that I shoved mutely down my throat every morning and night. I found an almost pleasure in slowly pushing away my friends, my family, my college career. Each time I skipped a class, I thought about my teachers and classmates wondering where I was and it brought me a narcissistic surface-level happiness to know that everything was going according to plan.
In my private life, I started taking weight loss pills from a shitty doctor that probably shouldn’t even be prescribing me Phentermine because it’s known to cause heart problems and induce psychotic breaks among patients like myself with a history of mental illness. Though that doctor never mentioned those potential side effects to me, my psychiatrist was very adamant that I stay vigilant while taking them, scolding me with her eyes for continuing to take them at all after her warning.
I used the pills as an excuse to practically give myself an eating disorder, calling what I was doing ‘fasting.’ In truth, I starved myself for weeks with the help of the pills repressing my appetite. Some days I ate nothing, and some days I would eat nothing but a handful of grapes or strawberries. It was glorious, that physical feeling of my body being completely empty with nothing but dehydration, migraines, and vaping to sustain me. Suddenly my physical body mirrored my mental one. I was completely empty, inside and out.
One night after almost two weeks of little to no sleep, I sat on the cold green tile in my bathroom with a red potato peelers and pushed the multiple sharp edges against my wrist. I always knew that I was cursed, or maybe blessed, with a low pain tolerance, and that I wouldn’t truly be able to hurt myself. The tiniest droplets of blood spilled from my veins and even then, even then, I didn’t feel a thing. I tried for hours to make myself truly bleed, truly feel the hurt and the pain that everyone kept assuring me that I really felt under all of the apathy, but there was nothing but that constant, imperturbable nothingness.
I thought then that maybe my plan wasn’t working because no one knew that it was even happening. My friends were distracted with school, not noticing my absence. My family had always had more important things on their mind than me. Maybe I needed to show someone this small part of my plan; maybe then I’d feel something through what they would feel at the revelation.
“Do you have any gauze? I cut my arm,” I texted my mother that night as I gently rubbed the pad of my index finger against the red, raised slashes on my wrist, marveling in this small novelty. Anyone who looked at this would think of me as a person that felt things. I gained an ounce of satisfaction from that.
“No I don’t. How did you cut your arm?” she responded, followed by a concerning amount of question marks.
“Knife,” I answered nonchalantly. “I’ll get some from Dollar General.”
“Like on purpose Mollie? Because if so, I’m coming to take you to the hospital so they can keep an eye on you at least for three plus days while I have to work.”
“Yes, it’s fine,” I told her. “No, it’s fine,” I assured.
“It’s not fine if you are over there trying to commit suicide. Not fine at all,” she texted.
Afterwards, she kept insisting on taking me to the hospital where I knew they would lock me up and be nothing other than a glorified suicide watch. The hospital couldn’t help me; the medicine I’d gotten from there had never helped me before. I assured my mother multiple times that I hadn’t truly hurt myself because of my fear of pain and that I wouldn’t do it again.
But now someone knew. Someone knew that I was supposedly hurt and hurting. Someone was somewhat privy to the plan and worried about me. And yet, nothing. My eyes didn’t blink with tears, my heart didn’t speed, and my breath didn’t quicken. I stayed comfortable in my bed, Love Island UK playing on the TV, feeling what would soon be a scar on my arm.
Two days later, it was time. I had my doubts, sure, like anyone would. I tried cutting myself again, this time on my right ankle. More nothing. I was disappointed in myself for being unable to control or elicit my own emotions. I was a control freak in nature, but this was the one thing that I could not control. So, I went back to my dance.
I spent an entire day writing heartfelt letters to my friends, my family, my almost boyfriend and ex-boyfriend. I thought writing about how sorry I was for leaving them would start to stem emotions from the heart, but I felt more like a sociopath, writing what I knew they’d want to hear to make them more comfortable with the fact that I’d be gone. I was a writer; I made stuff up all the time. This was no different from any class assignment.
I got my affairs in order, setting aside money for my debt and instructing that the rest of my savings be given to my cousin as an early wedding present and an apology for killing her maid of honor. It was like I was in a movie where there should’ve been dramatic classical music playing in the background of a sociopathic serial killer about to plan out his next meal. I loved the drama of it all, the setting, the scene. If only someone could watch what I was doing, feel for me what I could not feel for myself.
When the goodbyes were written and the money settled, my funeral completely planned out, I just laid back, watching TV mindlessly and waited for my father to fall asleep. Earlier that week, I’d asked my father if he still had a gun. He told me that he kept it in his truck. When he was finally asleep, it would be time.
I’d thought about other methods, of course. But the whole pain thing comes into account. I’m not brave enough to kill myself in a dramatically painful way like hanging myself or slitting my wrists in the bathtub. I’m no Sylvia Plath who could stick her head in the oven. I burned my hand on the oven once and have worn oven mitts ever since. I’m just not made for pain. A gun was a guaranteed death with little to no pain, but it was still dramatic like I wanted.
Around midnight when I could hear my father’s snores, I crept quietly out of my bedroom, through the kitchen, and out into the garage. I didn’t account for his loud alarm on his truck that beeped at what I felt at the time was a high volume whenever the door was opened. I rushed to quickly look for the gun in the glove box, in the console, lying on the backseat. I saw nothing, felt nothing.
I shut the door after moments of looking and fell to my knees on the ground. My heart was finally racing, my breathing panicked. Tears pooled in my eyes and then it finally happened. A feeling. I was feeling something. What was it? What was this feeling? And then just as quickly as it came, it disappeared. But I felt something. I felt something. I felt…
And then there was nothing. My old friend.