Recovered from “Fugitive Memoirs Volume I”
Thinking of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain and the case for oblivion, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own moments contemplating an embrace with the infinite. Two of them were distinct and raw, but somehow I also have vague, miasmic recollection of other slices of despair that may have risen to the level of the scrutiny of, to put it in the Bard’s words, self-slaughter. That these are amorphous memories suggests they were also intangible realities, but flirtations with permanent state changes are never quite trivial, are they?
Can means be a trigger for ends? As my forced wedding (the phrase “arranged wedding” is so suggestive of implied consent to be offensively misleading) approached, the horrid “wedding planner” my mother had recruited (Mrs. “Abigail Hunter-Rose”, a specialist in “difficult brides” as it happens) had me on a regular diet of 100mg or 200mg Chlorpromazine (Thorazine) pills. “Strong Aspirin,” she had said. “For your morning headaches, sweety.” I had morning headaches, of course, but mostly, I think, caused by the Thorazine in the first place.
I started palming them once I caught on (aspirin shouldn’t condemn you to a prone, semi-conscious fog for 15 hours a day), and it took me no time at all to amass a collection of 50 or so of the things. In one dark moment, it seemed I had neither a friend nor an ally in the world to help me escape the awful wedding fate. Just after I called down to the estate staff for a bottle of red wine to be brought up to my rooms, I opened the drawer on my bedside table and heard them rattle. I tore out the hidden envelope I had concealed by taping it under the drawer, and stared at the collection of pills: a large handful of pretty little beads, a dull shine reflecting off of their carefully-formulated dark-red, easy-to-swallow coating. Two dozen of them would have slid down my throat so easily, especially when chased with a fat glass of perfectly colour-coordinated red wine or two. 2.5-5.0 grams of Thorazine is probably well within the LD50 for someone of my weight. Slick tablets with barely a moment on the tongue, a quick binge on the bottle of wine (it wouldn’t have been the first time that month I had finished one off on my own) and a slow descent into the eternal dark.
I could spend days without human contact if I locked the master door to my apartments on the estate. Even if I lingered for a while in that twilight between here and there, it was unlikely that help would have arrived unbidden. Would I even have been missed, or would my departure have simply been managed? A quick transaction to clear the matter, and move on, much like my family had disposed of my beloved grandfather, a ritual so abbreviated I was not so much as invited, or even informed of his passing until months after the event had concluded.
A quick exit? Then again, did Mrs. Hunter-Rose’s regimen build my tolerance to a point where I would have simply suffered irreparable central nervous system damage? It is impossible to know, of course. In the end I chased only two of the pills with wine, and slipped into a much less final haze before somehow finding the strength to confront the demons (both internal and external) that I was battling.
The second brush with previous self harm was on the Mühlesteg bridge over the Limmat river in Zürich. In a crude imitation (the baseness of which surely contributed to my depression in that moment) of the the Pont des Arts in Paris, Swiss lovers had made a habit of affixing onto the railings of the bridge locks with their initials carved into the metal and then throwing the keys into the churning waters below. It seems silly now, but, having stolen a car from the motor pool and abandoning it nearby, I spent the better part of the midnight hour peering down into the dark, churning waters. The fall would barely have fractured my ankle, and though the water of the Limmat always seems cold, it would have taken some time to threaten my life. Still, the thought was there, and might eventually have triggered something more radical (certainly, I was not wonting for means with which to do myself deleterious harm). I suppose looking over the Golden Gate for any length of time with the body language I was surely exhibiting would have attracted some sort of good Samaritan attention, but the culture in Zürich is far too insular for a local to wonder after a young woman peering down into black waters, no matter how dark their countenance.
My psyche was thirsting for an act of some finality, certainly, but was somehow sated when I threw the keys to my apartments on the estate into the swirling waters below and swore off ever returning to my ancestral home instead (a vow I eventually broke, though not voluntarily, as it happens).
I am not certain I have any great words of comfort to offer those “in crisis” (or whatever the quaint term-of-art is nowadays). Victorious claims of “I’m so happy I changed my mind” always ring hollow to me. One is happy for satisfied customers who buy into continued existence, but it is, after all, impossible to catalogue the list of self-annihilators who (truth be told) spared themselves horrible future suffering “net-net”. Perhaps the best I can offer is that acts that tend to result in irrevocable effects are best avoided rather than sought after. So far my investment in this strategy has paid dividends.