I'm not sure what to write. I'm almost too blank to start off with anything of substance. I need to find a word for this feeling, this emptiness. It's not like I don't feel pain while I'm here, but rather this state is a defense mechanism as a direct result of the pain. I enter this state of nothingness. Complete dissociation. Detached from reality where I feel like I'm an observer of my actions instead of the director, even as a I write this now. It's this complete and utter mental void. Nothing past, nothing future, just the immediate and precise present. If I don't recall the past or ponder the future, what is there to be upset about? What is the right word for this feeling, this state of mind, this void? How do I conquer what I feel? What I've experienced? What I've gone through? How do I release it? Toss it into the wind, toss it back into the chaos that it came from?
I used to drive my father around years ago when he was too sick to drive himself. There were times as he sat in my passenger seat where he would have his left arm resting on his thigh, fist wound in a ball, with his right hand grasping his wrist down as hard as he could. It was like he was fighting himself, but you see it wasn't uncommon to see things like this from him. I've seen him grab his chest, yelp in pain, and jolt more times than any sane person could keep track of. I used to think this was some form of that, but here is the truth he told me last fall when I finally confronted him about his suicide attempt after my mom left: he told me that he stopped himself from driving not because he couldn't, but because he knew that if he was behind the wheel that he would be unable to stop himself from driving head first into the nearest wall. So rather than drive himself, he would ask me to drive him places. Then he would have to physical hold his hand down from pulling the wheel. He wanted to die so bad he had to restrain himself from trying to kill us both. My own father. And he told me that.
I know what it's like to want to die. I am not my father, but there is no one in this world that I am more similar with, and he I. I have lied for him, justified his actions, seen through his eyes, felt his pain, and contemplated death as a direct result of who he is and what he's done so many times. I know what it's like to have this duality to yourself. This part that wants to fight and this part that wants to die. I don't want to kill myself, but there are moments where I want it all to end. There's a difference. I remember a month or two ago grabbing the extension chord from the basement and setting it on the kitchen floor under the beams of my ceiling. There was this part of me that just kept telling me to grab it. I dance with the idea of death and the closer I get the more free I feel. Even if I don't want to actually do it, getting closer and closer means more and more relief. It's a fantasy. And I knew if I took that chord out of the basement it would make me feel better. That it would be a release. And you know what? It was. And here I am writing about it now.
You see I do not blame my father for wanting to die, but if I were to hang myself I would never want to use him as a counterweight.