Suicide Buddies

The Vandal In Distress

As aforementioned, living comes in waves just like anything. It's not a straight line of misery. It's undetectable valleys of it.

In a way, a straight line would do me good. The expected is easier than wariness of the unexpected. But I rarely ever got what I wanted how I wanted it, so I'd have to persevere through the indelible reality that for every good thing in my life came something horrible.

It wasn't so much that this something horrible came, but more so that something horrible always came at the worst fucking time. At the exact moment when I thought I was getting somewhere that wasn't nowhere, when Life was holding out its hand to me and I was finally close to grabbing it, everything went toppling back to square one, and I was where I used to be: at the bottom.

So many people have the audacity to be shocked when someone kills themselves, like sickness should be worn on the sleeves , and if it isn't, then it isn't real. There was God, sickness, the Devil, spirits; people believed for as much as they could understand. They didn't understand what they didn't know, and they didn't know what they didn't see. And people only saw what they wanted.

But that's not the point.

The point is it was the second-to-last Wednesday of June, humid as the tropics, warm with unseen sun, and raining. Raining in sparse amounts, random intervals, but dense in the grey sky and coming down all the same.

I would tell you more about it, about the scent of hot and soaked concrete, about the shift I missed at Mrs. Yang's, about the broken mug on the sink from nights before, but I wasn't concerned enough to remember those details until later. I can tell you two other things though:

How I dreamt, and how I woke up.

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I knew I was losing my mind because my mother told me.

In the folds of a nightmare, it went:

Between the bottom of the ocean, my childhood bedroom, the back kitchen of Mrs' Yang's, where Maia was suddenly a mermaid in the sink and Rae was her long-lost mother, where I was much younger than I really was but no one except me noticed. 

The water. The waters were black, and I swam through them to a tower—wood tower, lined with vines and berries. I rushed like my life depended on it, like something chased after me because something did, only I didn't know what and no one asked me because they were far too preoccupied drowning around me into the same water. The water cleared. Everyone was gone. Crystal blue and surrounding the tower higher and higher. I swam faster.

The tower. My mother pulled me up, sobbing incoherently. She yelled at me to let go, but she wouldn't let me go. The walls opened up, blooming like a flower. The sky was the water, falling on me in cascading waterfalls. My mother would not let me go. She begged for me to let her go. I saw Maia swimming for me, all human except for the gills on her neck. They choked under the pressure of air. My mother let me go. My mother screamed at me for letting her go.

The house. It was not my house. It was my house and my apartment, halfway between my childhood and my young adulthood. The hallways, wooden with dust and Greenway, flooded into pristine rooms clean with suburbs and Amasero Drive. I looked for my mother. I found a glass floor dining room instead, Mrs. Yang and Rae and Maia all screaming underneath it in pitch black water. I smiled at them, and became much younger all at once.