I overslept.  I lost the job.  Insomnia ruins more than sleep. 

          So I spent the day with my family for the 2011 Super Bowl—to not be alone.  Which team won or lost didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered.  I watched my seven-year-old niece play with her toys on the rug in front of the TV.  That didn’t matter.  Not to me.  Not in those few hours that I contemplated only one thing.  I stared, numb, at the moving objects on the screen.  They could have been football players or the Muppets or Rorschach in motion.  I didn’t know.  An exuberant life existed around me—some family watching the game, others joking and laughing.  I may have spoken a word.  Or maybe I didn’t.  I don’t remember. 

          What I do remember: I was going to get blind-shit drunk when I got home. 

          Every commercial during the game could have been for AA, or PSAs displaying a body slumped over a park bench from overdose on the sauce.  It didn’t matter. I was going to drink.

          This was four months into sobriety, following a near two-week coma when I drank myself into the hospital.  I’d been battling or submitting to other’s requests that I stay sober for ten months, when they wheeled me into the emergency room. 

          That Superbowl night, the first four bottles of cheap convenience store wine emptied in just over an hour.  Walking to a store for real liquor was just too far.  The second round of four bottles sent me dancing in ecstasy.  I was finally drunk and worry free again.  Amidst the dancing I punched a hole in the wall and ripped the door off a cabinet.  First nights back to binge drinking are confusing. 

          A week later, few an hour passing without some sort of alcohol when I wasn’t blacked out, I finally decided to make the walk to the liquor.  My kitchen counter was heavy with the weight of two milk-jug-looking bottles of bourbon.  I had remembered that I nearly drank myself to death four months earlier.  These two jugs should do the trick this time. 

          I finally wanted to die.  And I was ecstatic—a Zen-like joy.  More joyful than I had been in memory.  I danced again, punching and ripping not a thing.  Just dancing.  Smiling.  I plopped down on my bed and held my breath, pretending what it would be like when it happened for real. 

          It was that day that I lost something: freedom from my own hand.  Once I had visited the desire to end my own life—become excited for it—it would never dissipate.  Becoming convinced of the peace and joy of ending my life was not like vacation.  It’s a one-way ticket.  There has been no coming back from the cliff’s edge.  It remains an insurance policy.  No matter how bad things get, I can always close the book myself. 

          I don’t know how one says goodbye to something like the desire for suicide.  I don’t know if we ever do.  But it couldn’t hurt to at least believe it or fake it for a moment.  So, goodbye my own bitter hands of mortality.  Until some force outside myself comes along, I choose to stay.  

reference: humanparts.medium.com/held-my-breath-a42b73594cb1