[Note: Stephen King once wrote, on writing, that he "throws up in the morning and cleans up in the afternoon." Meaning he allows himself the scintillating freedom of writing, uninhibited, before editing. This is my new philosophy: to let my thoughts flow and fall where they may, bubbling and rolling and freewheeling outside the boundaries of highly edited self-critique. So, I guess, this is my way of vomiting.]
Yesterday somebody committed suicide three blocks away from my house.
I am sitting on the floor of my bedroom as I type this. There are clumps of hair on the floor that I can’t see until they get stuck to the bottom of my running socks, which are made out of some special moisture-wicking fabric that acts like hairball Velcro. I should vacuum.
I drove home from work around seven yesterday. I was in a hurry. I was hungry and had picked up two frozen pizzas from Whole Foods, since it was Tuesday and on Tuesdays they are two-for-one. I didn’t even turn on the radio. The sun was getting ready to set and between the houses and trees I could see the Olympic mountains outlined purple against the fading sky. I was driving home and I was hurrying and I was thinking about nothing and listening to nothing and running my hands through my hair, and somebody was about to kill himself.
I drove past his house, with my window down, listening to nothing.
Or her house. Why do I automatically think it was a man? Are men stronger? More likely to follow through on a fleeting, violent thought? Are they more desperate than women? Can they not process their emotions as well as we can? Is it sexist of me to assume that the person who pulled that trigger or took those pills or pulled that kitchen knife out of the drawer at seven in the evening as the sun was setting and I was driving home to have dinner was probably a man, and probably desperate, and probably stubborn enough to really-actually go through with it?
We heard the sirens as we ate. We drank wine and looked at gossip magazines. The police were taping off 73rd and kicking down a front door and finding a body on a floor or in a bathtub and we were debating Who Wore It Best.
Somebody somewhere is remembering putting a diaper on that body. Cradling a neck too small to support its own weight. Somebody can’t sleep tonight because they once held the hand of that dead person on the first day of school. Took pictures of him on a carousel at the state fair. Yelled at him. Sent him birthday cards. Took him camping with his cousins in the Olympics. Made him vacuum his bedroom floor. Somebody somewhere didn’t watch the sun set tonight because the sun can never set for them again, not ever.
You can’t see the clumps of hair on my carpet from far away, but from close up, here on the floor, they look like spiders from the corner of my eye. I wonder what else I am missing.
