i.

i think that often the most shocking specifics are trotted out like show ponies, as if to say– i am not like you. i will never be like you. i am insane and you are safe.

but who knows. maybe we are the same. maybe no matter where you go or what you do, you have a desperate desire to be swallowed up by death.

so here it is:

the specifics:

for fifteen straight years, i had a bizarrely chipper voice in my head telling me “you should kill yourself! you should kill yourself!” from the moment reality crashed in on me in the morning until i slipped into fitful sleep at night.

it started when i was 14, at the beginning of the indignities of misogyny. not the first, of course, but those most salient to the lizard in my hindbrain. (trapped, trapped,–) i have written poems about it before, ugly poems, poems where the heroine is held down and fed living slugs. let’s not rehash it– my nightmares do that enough. what is a scar but practice?

“you should kill yourself!” you should kill yourself!” i heard it in my head, incessantly, but it wasn’t me. many voices spoke in my head that weren’t me, at that age. sometimes the voices controlled my body like a doll and i would watch helplessly. they had names that i would carve into my skin, in precious private moments in an effort to finally shut them up. it didn’t work, of course.

i was scared, perpetually, but the voice knew exactly what to do. its answer was to die.

ii.

a happy ending is a moment, frozen. it does not extend forward.

once, recently, crowded into the kitchen with my chosen family, i felt a spark. through the clamoring noise and the oven-heat, i could smell the cookies and i could tell that they were gooey from heaps of brown sugar.

i was 32 years old and that the first time i have ever been glad to be alive. it doesn’t last, but that fleeting moment matters. i announced it to the kitchen, that for the first time, i was glad to have a body. they affirmed, in a church chorus, that they were glad i was alive too. the moment passes, and i am left hollow for its loss.

it was a happy ending.

maybe there will be more.

iii.

one year in every ten i manage it. okay, not quite, but… averages. y’know.

i memorized “lady lazarus” by sylvia plath for a high schol theatrical production around the theme of madness. the motif was chosen by the theatre teacher, grade eleven, and i have to wonder if anyone else (him? a classmate?) was touched by madness in the same way that i was. statistically, maybe. out of twenty? maybe someone else was experiencing the voices, the weeks-long trances, the dedicated skin carving. but the way they acted, their bodies stiff as they spoke, as if madness was a malady for other people only, for characters from mythology but never themselves, makes me doubt it. i was alone on stage.

sylvia plath died at thirty. (i had to google it, just now.) i am thirty-three now. i tell my boss (in his sixties) that i am having fun being old. a queer elder. he says wait until your knees hurt. i say they already do. i tell a coworker that people age wonderfully, becoming more and more themselves– whether that’s pleasant for the rest of us or not. when you’re fourteen, you worry about other people and what they might do to you, what they might pour down your throat. at thirty, you only worry about what you might do to yourself.

iv.

i am jealous that my dad died.

hell, i am jealous when anyone dies. they know something that i do not, something i have been seeking my entire life. they know what it’s like to close your eyes and not have to open them again.

as he dies, langorously, i salivate in my desire, my absolute lust for oblivion. i feel no grief. or is this what grief is, for me?

v.

is suicide selfish? i think many people, who haven’t experienced it or who have, insist that it is.

suicide is the last ditch effort of an animal caught in a trap. when your body is not your own, there remains one thing to do.

years ago, in a (frequent) fit of petulance, i told my partner that it was “selfish and immoral” and a violation of my consent to keep me here. when i wear myself out crying and pleading in their arms for them to let me die, they say with all the love in their strong but crumbling body: we missed the 27 club, my love, and now we are here together. the humor of someone who understands snaps through a rotten piece in me, and i exist again, still grumbling but alive.

i had different partners tell me: we will forgive you if you go. we have trod in your shoes and dammit, if you need to go, you can. they untangled something in my neurons but still i wonder.

we are, all four of us, still here.

vi.

i have been trying, throughout, to figure out why i am writing this.

it’s not so i can reassure people with platitudes, even though for me it did get better. (the voices come only rarely, now, and whisper. i use them like danger signs, a warning to pivot: to take a nap, to eat a hot meal, to say what i need to say.)

it’s not to be able to pretend that the suffering had meaning, because it didn’t. i used to weather people like storms, but actually, it was their choices in the end. no one ended up better for it.

the reason might be to tell you– you belong to your own damn self. your life, and your death, and your body. you might need to dye your hair and you might need to change your gender and you might need to kick and punch and bite, and your limbs and your hair and your teeth all belong to you.

in the end, though, i am not sure.

bug tourmaline is a transmasculine library denizen who writes experimental works in conflict with corporeality. His other projects can be found at linktr.ee/bugtourmaline.