Sometimes I feel so tired that the regular rest, the one that satisfies most people- such as getting 8 to 9 hours of solid sleep without waking, taking a good nap after lunch, lying on the sofa letting time run away with no hurry, no schedule, no annoying appointments- that kind of rest is not enough for me.
When this happens to me I plunge into what I usually call “my suicidal vortex”, a whirlwind of foolish visions of a macabre nature, but very soothing to me.
During those critical days I spend hours and hours planning the best way of committing suicide, without suffering any pain and with my corpse intact.I love beautiful, neat corpses. So I devote most of my days to conceiving that perfect suicide.
I imagine a thousand ways of going to a better place and getting rid forever of the worldly fatigue that blocks my path to profound rest. Whenever I cross a street I fantasize about throwing myself impulsively under the wheels of a car. Even better, a long trailer truck pulling a bulky and heavy load. But that kind of death doesn’t suit me because I don’t want to finish like a shapeless mass of torn flesh. I can see the subway train in the distance and I think of throwing myself onto the tracks, but it is the same thing: my broken body in a pool of blood.
I imagine that I go into the wild sea, too far ahead, where I lose my feet and cannot feel the bottom. And I drown with no one around to help me. This is a very clean death, but I am terrified by the creatures that live below the water’s surface (my childhood trauma with sharks is still there, thanks to Spielberg, and although I don’t care to drown at sea, I DON’T WANT TO BE DEVOURED BY A GREAT WHITE SHARK FOR ANYTHING IN THIS GOD’S WORLD.
I lean over a balcony and I feel the attraction of the void, a voice calling me by my name. So, I jump into the void, looking for the ground that is awaiting me impatiently at the other end. But I have the same problem: I don’t want my body smashed and dismembered on the ground under the terrible impact.
So, I change the subject and start pondering where I can get a lethal poison that will do me in fulminantly without making my entrails burst in a long agony. I know that in the Serranía de Ronda, not far from where I live, mandrake grows, a mythical plant with a very toxic root. I may try and drink a strong decoction.
I sharpen the kitchen knives nonstop and I visualize myself stabbing myself right through my heart, but I don’t trust my unsteady hand, let alone my bad aim. I want to die immediately. I like this classic very much: cutting my veins in the bath. I love the result: my dead body, stiff and rigid, so snow-white and intact, half sunk in red, bloody water. Will this method hurt much? It is my favorite one, at least for now.
The rod on which the living-room curtains hang becomes an improvised scaffold in my tired head and I see myself climbing the rungs of a portable ladder and adjusting the jump rope that used to belong to my daughter when she was a little girl around my neck. Suspended thus, I should die, asphyxiated, but what if I tie a lousy knot and I die slowly and painfully?
Fire is rejected. If every time I splash my hand with hot oil when frying eggs I see stars, so much it hurts, I just don’t want to know how much being burnt alive will hurt. My body all charred like Freddy Krueger or the Phantom of the Opera? And the fortune I have already spent on expensive beauty treatments, all for nothing? NO WAY!
´So, I turn to heart attack, but despite the fact that they are very common these days and kill a lot of people, you cannot choose the exact moment to have one. And although I can do everything possible to bring one of them on me, the idea of suffering a stroke terrifies me, as they are both cardiovascular diseases and the causes are the same. I believe in Murphy’s law, so instead of dying suddenly I could end my days in a vegetative state, severely mentally impaired.
Considering the situation, with so many problems, so many doubts and fears, my crazy suicidal inclination starts to fade away and I decide to reduce part of my extreme fatigue with less radical methods and, of course, reversible.