2010, the year I kill myself. These are the words that I muttered as my friends around me shouted, “Happy New Year!” There was no drama about it, just pure factual acknowledgement, and a strange sense of acceptance and quiet content. What is wrong with me?
I’ve been dragged into the dark watery abyss of depression and resurfaced. I’m no longer depressed. But I am no longer fully alive, the way I was, a distant life ago. But at least I am not a living dead the way I was during the descent. That’s the worst now, living day to day, feeling and knowing that you will not experience totally alive again. But there is worse.
These days, the tentacles of the abyss tickle at my feet. My life source, my heart, my soul has been treading the same waters, his head dipping under the surface, gasping desperately for breath. The “happy pills” gave buoyancy for a time until the passing of his father became a leaden bell, tied to his ankle, drawing him down, further, further, further.
In the early darkness of the 4th September, (4 pronounced “death” in Chinese), the abyss opened up and almost engulfed him, urged on by the leering, cognition-distorting jeers of alcohol. I could only restrain him in the delusion that I could. I glimpsed the complete devastation of myself without him in my world, and the end of my own life. He begged to be let go, set free, that despite his love for me and not wanting to leave me, life, or the total loss of desire to be private to it, was too much to bear. I clung to him. If death was going to claim him, death would have to claim me.
Here, we still are. He is like he has woken from a nightmare, only with the occasional intrusion of a memory or emotion from that night. It is my living nightmare because I can still feel every grief, despair, devastation, fear, loss and helplessness of losing my best friend, my soul mate, my love. That will not pass until I know that he is safe from the strangle-hold of the abyss. And I will keep him from it with all of my strength.
