Most of My Thoughts are Screams

What else is there? 

Do you want it to be quick? 

You don’t even know where or how to buy a gun. 

I have the pills. 

That’ll work. 

The prescription was for her mom, dated just a few weeks back, the bottle was mostly full: take 1 pill in the morning and evening with food. 

You’ll be taking more than that. I nodded and began twisting the top open. I shook the bottle to rattle the pills around—finally something satisfying. They smelt like her—where she came from, what I fell in love with, childhood. 

Even still? 

I gripped the bottle more tightly and turned towards the door into the kitchen. Slowly, I hovered above myself towards the glasses in the kitchen. Straining, I lifted my free hand towards the cabinet above the sink. The final loose screw finally gave up, too; the cabinet dangled from its lower hinge. 

Fitting. 

The subtlety of the universe never fails to scream. The faucet ran and the screw chased after it. The glass filled until it was half-empty—enough to finish the job I set out to do. Cabinet open, faucet running, I glided closer to the Duloxetine I stole that would steal me. Glass on the table, water tumbled over the side. The pills shook again as they begged to be noticed. I poured a single pill into the palm of my free hand, examined it, wondered if it knew its own power, stared towards a future I would end. 

You’ll need more than that. 

I didn’t write a note. 

And what would it say? 

Who would it be for? 

At least Trey needs to know that it wasn’t him. 

Wasn’t it? 

No—it was—it is—

Responsibility? Loneliness? Self-Discovery? Continued loss and disappointment? 

It wasn’t him, though. 

And he’ll work that through in therapy. 

His dad chose to leave. 

And you will set the tone of choosing to be better off. 

Not like this. 

Then how? 

I don’t—

You never do. 

Stop. 

Stop what? Telling you the truth? 

Stop. 

We’re past that. 

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!

There you are. 

What’s your problem? Why are you fighting me?

As if I wasn’t a part of you. 

Get out of my fucking head!

That’s never been how this works. 

I don’t want to do this. 

Then why are we already here?

Leave. 

I won’t ever leave. 

You need to—

Use more than that. 

My hand filled with pills I couldn’t count. My head tipped back. The pills trickled into my mouth. The water I felt on my hands slid closer to my face. The glass emptied, and I swallowed. 

I expected immediate darkness, instead I found silence. The water running made no sound as it slid down the drain. The air around me stilled and constrained. My heart fell to my feet and my shoulders numbed. A half-full bottle of pills glared at me as it tipped upside down, ticking and tacking into the sink and drifting with the water. My fingers lost control and the bottle fell with their contents. [Her mom] looking me right in the eye as she had when I left; the name burning a place in my memory. Take 1 pill in the morning and evening with food. 

“There. It’s done.” I spoke towards my own void. 

“Are you happy?” I spun around my room, looking for the figment that had been tormenting me for a lifetime. A shadow caught my attention, and I rushed towards it. 

“Why are you hiding over there? It’s done!” The shadow jumped away from the window as the tree outside shook from the breeze. Spinning around again, I searched for any sign of darkness in the middle of the day. Finding nothing, I scrambled to the windows, closing all the curtains, shutting off all the lights. I stood still in the grey surrounding me. “Where are you?” I asked towards the nothing I created. I needed more darkness. I crashed through the shadows and found the door to the closet. I slammed the door behind me, pushed past the shirts hanging from fragile rods, and behind them—arms cradling my bent knees, head relaxed towards them. My eyes opened, but it didn’t matter; the light begged entrance into sight and fluttered against my eyes. The little light that existed here bounced against whatever nothing was left. I felt my eyes blink, but I saw no difference in empty blackness. 

Are you there? 

My chest tightened—each heartbeat an earthquake. The pressure of the darkness made me sweat. My arms slipped off my knees. I forced my head back into the fall—hearing a crush that left no sense of feeling on my skull. My face pressed up against the lingering stench of detergent I chose because it smelled like her. 

Where did you go?

A tingling began behind my eyeballs—oozing emotions straight from my brain. My defenses collapsed, and even the darkness blurred beneath a sheath of old tears. Wetting my face, single drops became a stream I couldn’t stop. Drops fell from my chin without anywhere else to go. 

Are you finally gone? 

I scoured the silence, listening for a sign. I begged my heart to finally—finally—stop beating. Fatigue raced through my body, shutting it down. I felt my body slump into the corner—it’s only support. My legs melted into the carpet. My eyes stuttered fighting to stay open. The weight of the darkness won, and the world was encompassed in shadow. 

“Come back.”

I confessed—embarrassed to have even survived at all. “They’re loud and unignorable, consistent in a way that traps me into believing them.”

“You’ve articulated that well. You’re scared.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about them, but I wouldn’t say I’m scared anymore.” A stillness took over the room where even the thoughts that I was supposedly scared of ceased to come out. “I mean, when you get to this low, what else is scary? I have felt death.”

“And yet you’re still here.” I chuckled out of reflex—even perhaps disappointment. “Is there something funny about that?” In my own training, I learned to call out the easy defense mechanisms, too; people hide themselves in laughter. 

“I’ve always thought suicide was embarrassing.”

“Struggling to the point of suicide is embarrassing?”

“I think the concept of not being able to cope with the life that everyone experiences is embarrassing—like, wow, you couldn’t even make it through this? Something that everyone does?”

“You say that as though everyone experiences the same challenges in life.”

“It’s more like having to be remembered in the world—from the people who knew me—as someone who wasn’t bold enough or strong enough to hang on. They’ll remember me in weakness.” 

“And that’s embarrassing.”

“Simply put, yeah, I don’t want to be remembered for taking the easy way out.”

“The easy way out?” I shrugged. “Killing yourself is easy?”

“Easier than pushing through your own challenges, overcoming the world that has always felt against you, asking for help when you’re the one who’s needed, learning how to feel the pain of the world and not show it, ignoring the demons in my head, constantly pushing this giant boulder up a hill that never ends, seeing the look the face of others in true crisis knowing that you are so limited in the way you can even begin supporting them? Easier than being alive in a world that feels as though it’s so slowly collapsing in on itself without being able to hope enough that it will get better?” The silence pushed out against the walls. “Yeah, I feel like taking a bunch of pills and hiding in your closet until the very first feeling of tranquility I ever felt encapsulates me is easy.” I paused to catch my breath. “It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

“I don’t believe you.” 

The rest of the session was a blur; I went silent in hopes that I could just go back to the room I’d been sleeping in for the past couple days. I’d ended up here as a response to the failures I made in continuing on after a long series of adversity I wasn’t prepared for. The room was far too small but cold enough for me to sleep soundly. I’d visited these rooms before but never as a patient. I’ve never been the one to tape up a photo of my son on the wall by my pillow, to write in the journal on my bedside, to stitch up the socks that kept me from sliding over the tile floors, to float through the day of what was supposed to be support but felt more like a cruel exercise in punishment. Each body that entered gave me more a reason to wish my attempt had been successful—even still. 

Most of that night exists in shrouds—a haze of challenges I barely remember, a confusing mirage of images my own mind painted, a loud soundtrack of voices and sounds I can’t place as my own. The pills were sweet, enticing. The voices commanding my thoughts and actions felt warm, trustworthy, like a long lost guide allowing me to finally embark on the journey I had been destined for. Life didn’t feel fragile then; life felt obdurate, indestructible, a titanium wall that the chiseling of my existence wouldn’t ever be able to break. The bottle of pills became the weapon I would choose in the war of existence. The voices had assured me it would work, and, still, I lay here staring up at a concrete ceiling miles from any of the sparks that would have had a chance to ignite some sense of desire for life. 

“Have you tried naming these negative thought expressions?”

“I’ve heard of this before, yeah, but it always feels inauthentic.”

“Tell me more.”

“About the inauthenticity of naming a figment of my own mental illness?” She nodded. “The thoughts are mine. They share my name. Calling them anything else is just a way to distance them from me, no? But that feels wrong. They are me. I am the one feeling and receiving the impact of the thoughts. It’s me. I’m the problem—not fucking David or Greg or Connor or Meatloaf.”

“You’re taking ownership of the negative thought patterns and yet you have mentioned you have no control over them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to delineate the thoughts from yourself by naming them as another entity entirely?” 

“If I don’t take ownership of them, how am I ever going to incorporate them into my life? I need control over them, right? I should be able to hear these thoughts and counter them. Instead, I am a victim to them—sitting in the closet again in a space where I am powerless in my own mind.”

“Are you ready to tell me more about that night?”

“I’ve already told you what happened.”

“Tell me what you were thinking.”

“I really wasn’t.” The memories I had were pushed back perhaps involuntarily—a self-induced trauma response to shield my own body from the pain it inflicted on itself and the fear it promised. “No other thoughts existed in my mind when I walked back into my home that day—only the voice that’s plagued me most of my life. I thought he’d leave when I found myself again, but I think he was searching for me, too.”

“He?”

“What?”

“You said, ‘I thought he’d leave.’”

I named it immediately, fearing his eventual return--one that no one else will ever be able to see the way I do: Syphers.