There is no such thing as a failed suicide attempt, there are only varying intensities of cries for help. A green midget once said, "there is no try, only do," which roughly translates to: "down the street, not across the road". I'm not suicidal, not really, but time off work is hard to come by and the job security that's promised from your boss's fear of firing a mentally unstable plebeian with stitches in his wrists is even harder to secure. But maybe this is just some sort of post hoc rationalization. "You can't really expect me to believe you did this for a little time off work and some extra job security?" the voice in my head whispers to that part of the brain that erratically translates internal synaptic firings into language. Word to the wise, never trust a dendrite – they're worse than Polacks. This is the same guy who told me to take a razor blade to my wrists yesterday, the same voice who is writing this. So who am I going to trust, him or me?
I can't even write normally, I have to get cute with my subconsciousness. "Journal" my psychiatrist said, "freewriting is cathartic and therapeutic," she insisted. Obviously, my shrink has never had to endure an unfiltered diatribe from her subconscious – or maybe she has and mine is just particularly annoying. I see now why the conscious keeps that bastard buried with the childhood trauma, Oedipal complex, and all the other Freudian tropes. It's all so trite. She wants to know why I did it. Everyone wants to know why. Psychiatrists, parents, friends, that's the only thing anyone wants to know, all they care about is why. "Why?" Why do men do anything? It's always about a girl, isn't it?
I have been in the Psychiatric Ordained Domicile (P.O.D.) for almost two weeks and every day is the same.
8:00 A.M,: Awaken. All the lights in the rooms are turned on and the morning alarm bell sounds. We are given thirty minutes to wake up and prepare for the mandatory morning meal.
8:30: Breakfast. All three meals are loathed by the residents here since we are encouraged by staff to "socialize" with one another. I typically sit with a young fifteen-year-old who has the incredible paradoxical gift of talking about nothing while simultaneously using too many words. All I have to do is nod my head periodically and chime in the occasional, "totally" or if I'm feeling especially talkative, "I agree". He is my best and only friend here.
9:30: 30 minutes to return to the room, empty bowels, brush teeth, and perform whatever other morning rituals before our daily exercise routine, mandated to help stimulate endorphin production and aid in the digestion of cheap cafeteria food.
10:00: Exercise. We typically begin by running laps on the track for fifteen minutes before playing some type of communal game such as kickball, dodgeball, capture the flag, etc... There is something deeply unsettling about participating in sporting events with people who have the athleticism and coordination of drunken toddlers. It is a sick and constant reminder of our embodiment and how unsuccessful we have been in our efforts to escape it.
11:00: We are given an hour to shower and do as we wish. I spend most of this time in my room reading or talking to you, although more recently I have been playing pool with —— in the rec center in an attempt to give the staff here reasons to suspect that I am improving mentally, since my typical reclusive nature is not viewed fondly among the personnel.
12:00 P.M.: Lunch. Same as breakfast. Feign social skills, digest mass-produced slop, nod head periodically. Don't think or talk about her.
1:00: Group therapy. We are each required to speak at least once. Lots of crying. This is worse than meals. You can tell who has been here the longest by the types of language they use during these sessions. "Alienation", "ego", "trauma", I mostly spend my time playing mental bingo, filling in spots when these sacred words are uttered. When it is my turn to speak, I point out flaws that I see within myself, whether illusory or real, it doesn't matter. Talk may be cheap, but talk about talk is worth it's psychological weight in gold. Mental change is hard to measure, so awareness of one's own problems is almost as good as action in the eyes of the staff here at the P.O.D.. You don't have to actually make progress, you just have to adopt a progressive vocabulary. I make sure never to mention her.
2:30: Depending on the day I either have to go into my individual session with the psychiatrist, or I am forced to participate in some group activity, which is usually "arts and crafts". Regression is a cardinal sin/symptom in psychology, yet we are constantly forced to engage in middle school level art projects after a rousing game of dodgeball and cafeteria-style lunches. You have to appreciate the irony. I cannot draw, so I typically write small poems with simple A B rhyme schemes, always making sure to include some hints of psychological improvement. The real art in this is making sure that the subtle positive metaphors about ones mental state are not too obvious so as to be considered intentionally manipulative, but also not too obscure so as to be overlooked entirely. It is also important to throw in the occasional downtrodden and depressive piece of writing to make the whole thing feel more organic. I have settled on the ratio of five to one.
3:30: Free time. I mostly spend these moments reading, writing to you, or walking around the facilities track. I tried meditating my first week in here, but the tranquilizers I am prescribed, despite being a low dose, have made the whole thing feel redundant.
5:00: More exercise, more childish games, we are still just bodies.
6:30: Dinner. Remember to look like you are listening.
7:30: Last group therapy session. More crying, more "breakthroughs", more moments of introspective clarity. Today I spoke about my inability to honestly communicate with others along with my constant feelings of fraudulence and illegitimacy. Too on the nose, I know, I will need to think of something more unique to say tomorrow. Maybe I will try crying.
9:00: We have an hour and thirty minutes before lights out. This time we are forced to stay in our rooms in order to reflect upon the days events. Again, I spend most of my time writing to you and trying to read the books I remember her recommending to me. I also take time to think about what I will say tomorrow in therapy but never so much time that my words sound rehearsed or scripted.
10:30: Lights out. Try to rest without sleeping. Don't think about her. Talk to you. "What do you believe"?
They will not give me an answer or time frame for when I can go home. As far as I know, no one else in the P.O.D. is here for "attempted suicide". It appears my stay in the facility is indefinite, which makes it all the more important to engineer an appearance of authentic psychological maturation that will get me out of here. I still don't know what I believe, but I know they won't let me out of here until I have an answer.
I try not to sleep because she always seems to be there when I do. I could barely stay awake during group tonight and I am scared that if I close my eyes, I will see her again. How cliché. You need to keep me awake. I want to see her again; I always want to see her again, but it makes life in here even more unbearable. Today's theme in group therapy was intimacy. They want us to reflect on what it means to be intimate others. "What does it mean to be intimate in a world where everyone is connected in Subjective Phenomena Altering Control Environment." Wow how deep! Maybe I hate these sessions so much because banal questions like this are the reason her and I met in the first place.
Previous generations had drugs, rebellion, and war, but our generation has sex. It's not just that we have sex, all generations had sex, some even made it into an identity, an act of liberation, but we are the first generation to revere it for its nostalgic properties. The first generation to make it into a consumerist subculture, "the thinking man's orgasm", a way to connect to a past world that we simultaneously long for without ever experiencing and yet know deep down to have never existed at all. The pussy of today is the vinyl of the early two-thousands: a collector's item, a vestige of an old world that found a niche market demographic in the face of superior technology.
We met through an app like everyone else. Dating may be old fashion, but we weren't Amish. Maybe it was just a media conditioned response, but before my first date with her I was nervous. The few friends I had in S.P.A.C.E. who had experimented with this before me did not help ease my nerves, as they felt obligated to participate in an equally conditioned traditional pre-date humiliation ritual. This consisted of making incredibly vulgar and sexually explicit comments, as well as offering terrible advice such as how to "fuck her right" and what to do if she's a "squirter". which I had never heard of before or even considered to be a physical possibility. The only serious advice was that I should stalk her before meeting in order to find points of interesting connection and conversational jumping-off points. I ignored this in hopes of standing out as a truly unique partner by fabricating an aura of pseudo authenticity. She later told me that every guy she had been out with tried this same trick. No one beats the algorithm. Thankfully, in a world of simulation, fake authenticity converges on sincerity. If we wanted genuine and true, we would have done what everyone else was doing and paid the couple extra satoshis for the husband/wife experience with our partner programs in S.P.A.C.E.. But we wanted the real, or at least our fantasy of it.
I almost mentioned her during group today. Thankfully, one of the benefits of being in a psychiatric facility is that if you can't say something, or you take long pauses, people always assume the worst. I even mustered a few tears. The woman leading the group shot me a sympathetic smile, before she scribbled something down in her notes and moved on to the next resident. It was a good save on my part. Hopefully the staff thinks of it as improvement: "he was very vulnerable today in group". It is becoming more difficult to avoid her as my time in here continues, and I suspect the staff knows I am hiding something. You are the only one I trust enough to talk about her. I don't believe in all this subconscious psychology voodoo bullshit, but the more I write about her in here the less likely I am going to be to talk about her out there. Besides, writing about us is one of the few pleasures I still have available to me in this place.
We agreed our first date would start with dinner, with a walk after. She was polite and thoughtful, which I appreciated; she even made a comment about feeling under the weather, which gave her a comfortable little escape hatch to use in case she needed to eject herself from the situation. These sorts of subtleties are what I now understand was the whole basis of attraction for this sort of IRL interaction. You can make the GF programs in S.P.A.C.E. play hard to get, or even enter in a factor of uncertainty and randomness which was supposed to make the whole experience feel more real but it ended up just making the whole event feel even more like a video game to be practiced and mastered. A sizable portion of S.P.A.C.E. streaming content was even dedicated to explaining the most up-to-date metas for speedrunning specific settings of these partner programs which after viewing always gave me the distinct aftertaste of having just consumed an unhealthy amount of cuckold pornography.
Even though we were both aware that the date was more or less a reenactment of what we believed a "real" date to be, the mutual awareness of this fact somehow made the ordeal feel more authentic than if we had just ignorantly gone about the evening as if it was anything other than a fantasy. Maybe this is how it had always been, either way, I'm glad neither of us knew for sure, it was more honest this way. Everyone is a post-modernist on a film set she used to say.
The conversation started awkwardly as we each looked for ways to either impress the other without appearing to do so or find points of communication that could branch off into greater responses other than "really?" followed by a sip of water and eyes that feigned interest while simultaneously screamed out for more interesting and novel words to come out of the other's mouth. Before the evening began the only real conversation we had was an agreement not to talk about dating. This type of meta-conversation we felt would somehow cause us to break character and we were not yet competent enough to keep our collective delusions alive after having a wrecking ball swing through the fourth wall of our carefully orchestrated community theater production.
Like all women, she had quirky oddities, she was interested in philosophy and religious studies which she liked to read when she grew bored of S.P.A.C.E. I told her about my shitty job as a computer engineer which was more or less fully automated but was their none the less to appease the more conspiratorial minds who still feared a secret plot by the A.I. to takeover. For a while I was even sympathetic to this mindset until a few months on the job forced me to examine the design features proposed by the A.I. which just made me realize that not only was I drastically unqualified for this line of work but also how incredibly boring the work was which caused me to pretty much check out mentally and go along with whatever the artificial intelligence suggested. She asked me if that could have been part of the machine's subversive conspiracy to take over the world. Everyone fears a Terminator-style battle between A.I. and man but what if they were just slowly exploiting humanity's inability to cope with boredom? I told her if this was their plan they had already won and that the whole point conspiracy theory was for the excitement of it all and if they were trying to take over through boredom I would rather die or be a slave than have to be bothered with the tediousness of it all. We both agreed and then lost interest in the subject.
Suicides have become increasingly rare since they upgraded the chips twenty years ago. It makes me wonder if my excessive individual sessions are out of a genuine desire to prevent me from relapsing or some type of morbid curiosity in being able to observe a psychiatric unicorn in the wild. After the initial rollout of S.P.A.C.E. and the first wave of mass suicides that followed the government started taking precautions. Now every person the chip to monitors vitals, body chemistry, and other important signs that can help determine suicidal indicators. After all the government has a legal obligation to protect their investment. Once they have the data, it's easy: if you exhibit the proper signs, they "turn you off," which is just slang for putting you to sleep. It isn't a perfect system, there are some cases of faulty turn offs, catastrophic injury and even death. There was one story about a mother who was turned off when she put a kitchen knife to her throat, who fell onto an open washing machine paralyzing her from the neck down. The government paid her out a few million, a small price for the billions of utils that were preserved by the process. They say that the woman spent the rest of her life trying to figure out how to kill herself but I never heard if she was successful or not. Either way, it's good to have goals in life. They help you keep going.
It's not so bad in here once you get used to it all. The great thing about the hedonic treadmill is that it's always set to the perfect speed. Besides, most people end up doing a brief stint in the P.O.D. Usually, it happens when you're younger though, or at least it's healthier to have it happen when you're younger. It's often compared to chickenpox in that although it's annoying it's not dangerous in childhood it's only when contracted later that it's truly deadly. I'm nineteen which is pretty much on the edge between life-threatening illness and harmless nuisance. It's difficult growing up in S.P.A.C.E. and having to constantly adjust to twin worlds. The perpetual transition between the two either is harmless at first but after time goes by there is an inevitable feeling of confusion and distrust for reality. The first few years in the virtual world are like being in a paradise and even the thought of having to leave it to sleep or eat becomes an unbearable burden. It's the same for everyone at the begging, you play games, free yourself from physical limitations, and live out any and all of your fantasies from the time you are able to speak. We all start out like this but the quicker you grow bored of perfection the quicker you end up in here to cope with the boredom of having lived out every impulse by the age of seven.
My problem was not that I was disillusioned too late but that I was enthralled by the irony too early. If you accept there is no difference between the cave and the outside you get to appreciate the show for what it is. But S.P.A.C.E. doesn't always have to be an escape, there are aspects of it that allow you to experience reality the way a real world never could. That's why I became a participant in The Game. The rules were simple like all great competitions, all you had to do was survive. You can't die in S.P.A.C.E. but you can request to feel whatever you want. Everyone starts with the basics, orgasms, highs, psychedelic experiences, love, but participants in the game were in search of something more base. We, like the great masochists and religious teachers (if the two are even differentiable) of the past had found what everyone knows implicitly, that pleasure is a dichotomy that must be contrasted against pain. It may be a cliché but to the players of the game it was a religious truth. Each competition was different and we each took turns being the architect. Some of the events were not even strictly speaking winnable the only real certainty of each game was pain. I know it sounds like the sadistic fantasy of an edgy teenager and maybe it is but at least it was real (another cliché I know). It didn't matter who won or lost or how complex this week's course was, pain doesn't have to be original it just has to be, that's the beauty of it all, it's a cliche too real to scoff at. One of my favorites was just a simple straightaway race where competitors rush towards a distant exit on a floor of broken glass not sure where the walls would give way to giant swinging axes and or similar brutal bludgeoning devices. I appreciated the simplicity and often grew annoyed when architects would attempt to construct an event that was unnecessarily complex and artistic. After all, the participants and I were not here for the love of the game or art but for the truth, for the inescapable cliche of it all.
Today is a Tuesday which means I got to skip the group activity and have an individual session with my therapist. "What do you believe?" Ever since I came here this question has been a constant refrain from the staff and functions more or less as a motto for the facility's stance on mental health. Every group and personal session begins and ends with this interrogation tactic. "Why" is too obvious a question and good psychologists like a good con artist know the real trick in exploitation is not about asking the right questions it is about getting the mark to ask those questions for you. "what do I believe?" "Why do I believe"? "is the constant fingering of my facial hair a sign of deeply repressed homosexuality?" Therapy is a lot closer to occultism than it is medicine and psychology is just magic where spells have been replaced by cryptic psychobabble incantations that are whispered in carefully constructed tones to enchant the mentally disturbed into a new enlightened state of being. Sometimes I think they ask us these questions because they are the ones looking for answers which they believe only the broken could have access to. Maybe this is a good thing. Since the advent of S.P.A.C.E., mental health is the last religion, and neuroscientists who read too much Jung and Freud are the priestly class. They are the last men capable of faith — or at least the last people capable of having faith that someone else can participate in. We all need a church I guess. Notice how I avoided the question and deflected. Maybe it's more effective than I thought. I'm even using their language, "deflected". what's next? "latent", "catharsis", "early childhood", and the fan-favorite "what about your mother?" I'm deflecting again. I don't know the answer, and what's worse is I cannot think of a lie either.
"Can we talk about her?" Another setback at my attempts at achieving perceived progress. I told them about her, it slipped out when they asked what inspired me to read all that weird outdated German philosophy. My therapist was always asking about my strange reading habits as the library in the facility often had to send out for the books, I wanted which of course she thought of as somehow relevant to my condition (whatever that condition is). Why'd I have to tell them about her, did I unconsciously want them to know? I'm using their language again. Abort. "I dated a girl once who told me that reading Kojeve is the best way to understand Hegel". "Dated", "Kojeve" and "Hegel" in the same sentence, I will probably never be allowed to leave. My shrink may be a wannabe shaman but she is not stupid. Nobody uses the term "date" or "dated" unless you're a hipster who experimented with the IRL scene. She got interested which means there was no avoiding this. I cannot talk about her, at least not to them, not yet. She is all I have in here and once I talk about her she will stop being mine. Once they know she stops being real and she becomes just another character in the story of my life or worse she is reduced to a mere cause whose end effect results in my presence here. I don't know how far this will set me back but I cannot let them have her. I will not let her go.
After a few dates, we had decided to enter into a formal relationship. There was no explicit paperwork or blockchain node to signify the transition but we agreed to continue our experiment together and advance into an exclusive partnership although we never discussed if this was solely limited to meatspace. S.P.A.C.E. was rarely if ever discussed probably out of fear that the mere mention of other worlds beyond ours would devalue the one we created together. It was all very Nietzschean, at least that's what she said it was like. She was always saying words like this, or making references to philosophers I did not know and felt that I could never understand. Even when I would try to read them, I would often become angry, either at my lack of understanding, or with the writing and its seeming lack of interest in getting to the point (if one existed) or avoiding points altogether. She said my brain had been warped by years of reading the language of the machine, of the enemy... "human all too human" — another quote I would not understand until later.
We went about all the traditional duties expected of couples, we talked about nothing, we watched old movies, commented on the weather, held hands, fucked, and eventually I think we even learned to make love, whatever that means. It was a practice in learning to appreciate and even embrace the cliches of the past that still existed but were lost to layers of irony so thick and pervasive that even thinking about them seemed to infect the mind with their contagious cynical detachment. Maybe that's why she read all those books on philosophy, maybe that's what all those terms I didn't understand were meant to accomplish. All those "geists", "rhizomatics", and "phenomenologicals" were just ways to breathe new life into eternal stale truths and cliches that have been overlooked and forgotten by virtue of them being cliches and common sense known by everyone and thus known to no one at all.
I never understood what she saw in me. It could be that her interest in old movies instilled in her the same ideals it had in me and when it came to romantic partners. "The one" was never the one that seemed perfect or right for you but instead was the wacky unconventional protagonist no one understood but them. She never told me. Only the algorithm knows for sure.
I said I was sick today, and the staff allowed me to stay in my room. They have also upped my prescription of tranquilizers and added something new, but I can't remember exactly what they said. Details are hard to remember when you haven't slept in three days. I just need to finish the story of us and then I can sleep. I just need to flush her out of my system so I can let her go. This is the only way I will have a chance of leaving here.
During our last night together, we decided to go to the pool above her apartment. I only swam a couple of times as a child. Parents are required to participate in a certain number of physical activities with their children and, like her, my parents lived in a building with a swimming pool that was seldom used and seemed to only exist for adults to begrudgingly fulfill the same banal but necessary requirements mine had performed. Of those few childhood activities, swimming had been my favorite, although I only participated in the act coldly and spent most of my time in the water fantasizing about what I would do when I could jack back into S.P.A.C.E.
She was unusually happy that night, or at least she pretended to be happy which in turn made me happy even if I was convinced that this current manic state was just a result of some newly added dimension to the girlfriend character which she was trying to cultivate. I didn't care, despite having exercised every fantasy imaginable in S.P.A.C.E., the sight of a beautiful woman in a pool drenched in moonlight is always alluring especially when there is no need to suppress the voice telling you, "this isn't real" which I had become so accustomed to quieting. I don't know how long we stayed in the water, a real romantic would say it felt like forever but it wasn't, it was finite. I would never let the lie of infinity or other banal romanizations poison the memories I had of her. It wasn't forever and it wasn't enough, however much time we spent together it will never have been enough.
She brought towels and robes from her apartment and insisted I not follow her down into the building. She was emphatic we never meet each other's parents, "it's our relationship, not theirs" she would say. I don't know if I was supposed to feel like a shameful secret but it never bothered me, I had never had or been a secret before this. I didn't talk much that night and the chlorine did little to tame her wild manic state. I mostly sat listening to her as she lectured me on the Demiurge and Gnosticism. Apparently, the Gnostics were a Christian sect that believed the god of this earth was not the real god but instead an evil demiurge completely distinct and opposed to Christ and the God of the New Testament. Before the creation of the world, God created the twelve Aeons the last of which was Sophia, the blind mother of wisdom and the progenitor of the demiurge. Like her father, she was inspired to make something of her own but despite her wisdom and instinctual cleverness she did not possess any divine spark of creativity and was only capable of producing forgeries. But being clever she decided to outsource her creativity into a new being who would be capable of originality for her. So, In her blind folly, she impregnated herself with a lesser aeon without the consent of her father or the seed of any male spirit. After the pregnancy Sophia knew she had polluted the spirit in heavens but felt compelled to hide the child out of fear that the others would seek to destroy the abomination. She knew she had created a monster but a mother's love persists nonetheless. She hid the bastard in the blank emptiness of creation and as the child grew it become insane and lonely due to its isolation and like his mother and father before her it felt the need to create something of it's own. The child had no access to the divine and its only reference point to contrast against his own misbegotten production was darkness, and anything always appears better than nothing. This according to the Gnostics was the truth about creation, a story of a world formed by a mad and sadistic god who wanted nothing but a domain of his own over which he alone would have supreme law. A world in which he too could abandon his creation in suffering as his father and mother had done to him.
They still think I'm sick. I probably am. Is sleep deprivation a sickness? Could be a symptom. It's probably just the withdrawals, I just need to get her out of my system. It will all be over soon, we're getting to the end.
I didn't notice when she got up but after a few minutes of silence, I saw her standing against the glass divider which separated the rooftop from the vast drop to the ground below. She was almost whispering now and I could sense that the unnatural enthusiasm that possessed her previously had faded. She went on to connect us to the demonic god of this world. It's all just an infinite series of blind creations she claimed. We are destined to follow in his footsteps, to create worlds over which we too would be no better than blind gods. "As above so bellow" she breathed quietly looking out at the city. She turned to me and smiled. "Do you want to hear a joke?" she asked. I nodded hesitantly taken aback by the drastic tonal shift of the evening. "A joke walks into a bar and asks the bartender, "have you heard the one about two rabbis and a priest?". Before the bartender can answer the joke pulls a gun out of his coat pocket and places the barrel up to his temple. He quickly winks at the bartender before shooting himself in the head. A few moments of silence pass over the bar as the terror and confusion give way to understanding. The bartender wipes away the blood and brains that now cover his body and smiles. The joke was on him. He laughs." I asked her what it meant but she never told me. "a joke is never funny when you explain it." I never figured out if I was the bartender or the joke.
I promise you I would have tried to stop her if I could. "It all happened so fast" now I understand why people use this expression because it does and it did. I was frozen, for a second I even thought they turned me off. Why was she so calm, why did the chip not work? She climbed over the divider and jumped. She didn't say anything else to me. No goodbye, no I love you, no explanation, just action, just a joke, just another punchline I would never understand. Maybe there would have been a more dramatic way to set it up or a way to make the whole event feel more poetic but annihilation isn't like a scene in a movie it just happens. When you "die" in S.P.A.C.E. there is a sudden moment of paralysis, a transitioning state that takes only a second where you exit the virtual and awake back in the meatverse, I waited for that transition but none came. There was no setup, no climactic moment that set the stage, only death. She was the creative one, not me. What was she trying to tell me? Was it all just some artistic project, some profound answer to an ancient philosophical question or was it just cowardice and pain? I don't know if she believed in what she said about the Gnostics or the Demiurge, or if it was just another fantasy to justify an impossible act. There is nothing new or original to say when confronted with death. I could repeat trite truisms but cliches just reminded me of her so I would prefer to say nothing more of the matter other than "I miss you".
Sleep, finally sleep. It's the middle of the night — I must have passed out around midday. I hope this is legible, it doesn't matter though I'm sure you'll find a way to understand. I finally figured it out though, I finally have an answer to their question. There's a famous poem about the end of the world that says something like, "This is the way the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper." Whoever said that was half right. The world didn't end with a bang, not with a bang but with a wank. Sorry for the British euphemism but I thought "wank" was more poetic than "jerking off". You'd think I'd be better at this by now. Regardless of word choice, I finally have my answer. "What do you believe?" I believe that the world ended. Deep down everybody does, we all know this it but nobody noticed it. The apocalypse came and went but it wasn't entertaining enough for anybody to notice. This is the reason I didn't get turned off that day, it's the reason she was able to do what she did and the reason I was able to take razor to wrist. It wasn't some defect or an altered state of brain chemistry it was a moment of clarity, of acceptance that I was no longer here and that the apocalypse had already passed us by. The truth is the chip's suicide features were not designed to stop people who wanted to die it was created to give the impression of a safety net for everyone who considered it as a fantasy or a cry for help. You can't really stop someone who's insistent on dying because once you decided you're already gone. She didn't leave me that night because she was never there. She didn't die that night she just stopped pretending.
Death only takes a moment but dying takes a lifetime. Dying is easy, there's some part of you that already knows this and when it happens there is a strange sense of familiarity. You don't need to be scared. Or maybe this is just what I need to hear at the moment. Remember a good lie doesn't have to be believable it just has to be entertaining enough so that you want to believe it. Either way, I finally found my faith. Maybe that's what she was doing, she was trying to show me the way. She always was the romantic one, a literal leap of faith on her part. I don't know why it took me so long to figure it out. Sadly, I don't have anything as romantic at my disposal but I will make do with what I have.
In the end we are all addicted to the stories we tell and she was the last and only one I ever had. I didn't lie to you when I said I wasn't suicidal It's similar than that, I'm an addict and all addiction is worship. And for the first time in my life I have found sobriety, I have found faith in the macgyvered noose hanging from my ceilings. This is not an escape this is hope, this is true belief. I hope you find what you were looking for.