Oh, and above all, be certain you do it first thing in the morning, before you eat anything. Empty is best, a clean foundation on which to build your mausoleum.
It’s now quarter to two in the afternoon, but fortunately, I missed breakfast by becoming a black hole and going back to the start of the universe.
I picked up some other handy information during my stays at the institution. For a girl of my weight, I should need only ten to fourteen pills to get the job done, and I used this base of knowledge two weeks after I was released the first time. Unfortunately, however succinctly something can be calculated in theory, reality tends to be more messy and unpleasant, and I failed because I vomited. This will not happen now, thanks to the Orange Crush girl and her helpful refinements.
And I really would owe her, except she killed herself six months after I met her. Not with pills, though.
My plan is set. I have my place, the boiler room. I have my timing, which is as soon as I get back to the dorm. With these two things decided, I reach forward to get a box of aspirin and am surprised to find that there’s a cold Orange Crush soda already in my hand. Apparently, I was prescient enough to grab one from the cooler on the way back here to the pain reliever section.
I switch the Orange Crush to my left hand, and pick up a box of extra-strength aspirin. It’s the generic brand, the kind with a label that’s been designed to mimic the leading national product’s. I have a thought that I am totally my mother’s daughter. As she wears almost-there perfume, I will kill myself with knockoff aspirin. I check the milligram dosage and then see that there are fifty pills in the bottle inside the box. I think about the cost of the soda. I do some math. I pick up a second bottle of aspirin just in case.
The challenge is going to be keeping the pills down long enough so that the acetylsalicylic acid has time to be absorbed into my bloodstream. Even though I only need about a dozen pills, I will try to take half the bottle. This strikes me as a nice medium, providing a suitable cushion upward from what my body weight requires, without putting so many in that my stomach becomes irrepressibly irritated. As I contemplate the self-control that’s going to be required not to give in to gag reflex, I try to reassure myself that anything is possible if you put your mind to it—
Without warning, a sadness creeps up on me, and like a stranger tapping me on the shoulder to ask for directions, it’s the sort of thing I cannot ignore. Even as I’m so far into the approaching attempt that my salivary glands are tingling sure as if the nausea is already starting to hit, even as I contemplate with grim, excited purpose my end goal of showing Greta that her favorite hobby of fucking with people can backfire big-time, a small part of me is aware that I’m here once again. I’m on this precipice, staring down into another grave.
How am I here again? I wonder.
But that question is a stupid one to ask. I have bipolar with mania. Crashes happen. I’m crashing now.
But at least I’m finally fixing the problem so I won’t ever have to worry about doing this again—and Greta is going to help me. The statistics, after all, aren’t in my favor. According to an article I read after my second attempt, the suicide success rate of aspirin in adolescents is only between one and two percent, not the kind of odds you want if you’re way past the cry for attention stage and on to bigger and better things. And perhaps it’s because of this high failure rate that guns and suffocation are more typically used. Here at Ambrose, however, there are no guns to be had, and hanging myself isn’t something I want to rope myself into. I like the idea of simply going to sleep and not waking up, although I know that I’m looking at convulsions first before the calm of stage two sets in—
I cannot believe I am here again.
I promised myself I would not, no matter how bad it got, do this to myself anymore.
This is the danger of my disease, though. For normal people, deep depression is a descent down a long, slow trail. It takes time to set in. This is not the case for me. With my disease, clinical depression is just a slip and fall away, its flimsy triggers totally disproportionate to how far and how fast I can decline. In a matter of hours—sometimes minutes, or even moments—my brain can plunge me into territory it would take others years of suffering to get to. It’s the same for the mania. And both extremes, regardless of their lickety-split arrival, are things I experience as if they are the culmination of decades of emotional shift.
I am here again.
I think of my mother, though I don’t want to. I think of her alone in that house we have lived in all of my conscious life. I tell myself that her magazines will keep her company, that they are her family anyway. I try to jump-start the motor of a happy future for her, my father and her resuming their relationship as if nothing has happened, the fifteen years of my existence scrubbed clean by the elbow grease of my suicide, the stain gone, the floor tiles of the rest of their days and nights as well as the grout of their attraction and feelings for each other gleaming cleanly in the bright light of promise once again. And then I try to reconnect with my image of Greta in the headmaster’s office, the confusion on her face as she is told she must leave the school a blazing satisfaction as my spirit watches from one of the corners by the ceiling, a floating sentry enjoying the success of my plan.
I get nowhere with any of it. Instead, I become too acutely aware that I am holding aspirin in one hand and an Orange Crush in the other, and that I’m going to go kill myself on a dirty floor that will smell like old motor oil.
I think of the way I stood alone on the summit of the mountain as the girls funneled back onto the trail, my eyes drinking in the majesty before me, my soul joining in with everything around me, even Greta. I remember the wind on my face and the sun on my back and the cold water bottle in my hand, all of my senses receiving an unexpected gift, my mind calming, for once. I didn’t expect that moment. And when I follow through with this, and I will, there will never again exist the possibility for my set of eyes, for my pair of ears, for my skin and body, to feed on the beauty around me. I will be over. I will be nothing.
After years of being at the mercy of my hallucinations, I know for a fact that there is no such thing as God, and I miss me already. Everyone and everything else will go on, but I will be gone—
A hand taps me on the shoulder. I turn sharply and look up.
It is not a metaphor this time.
The man looking down at me is the pharmacist. I recognize him from my first trip here. He has thick salt-and-pepper gray hair that is brushed back from a shiny forehead. He’s wearing a white coat over a tie and button-down shirt. His lips are moving. He’s speaking to me.
So much of me is tied up in my attempt that I can’t decipher his words. I figure he must be warning me not to think I can get away with shoplifting. I put my hand into my pocket, take out my last five-dollar bill, and thrust the crumpled wad to him.
“What’s this?” he asks as he glances at what I’m pushing on him.
It’s strange to have his voice register, my hearing coming back with no warning. I open my mouth to tell him it’s a five-dollar bill, the last one I have, as well as the last one I need, and isn’t that a lucky coincidence. Except as I look down, I see I am not holding out something that has Abraham Lincoln’s face on it. I’m offering the pharmacist a slip of paper. He takes it and reads whatever it is. Then he looks into my eyes again.