The Suicide Note
The Suicide Note
To whom it may concern-
Today I am going to kill myself. It is very likely that by the time you have found this letter, I will already be dead. I write these first few sentences to you, simply out of obligation, for I have read and heard too many times that this is how one should write a suicide note. I would wonder how the tradition got started, but I haven't the time or the paper. But I digress. I have thought long and hard about how I would do it, if I could find the courage. I could jump of a building, but I would wonder whether it would be the fall or the impact that killed me. I could slash my wrists, but that would be uncommonly messy. Besides which, I hate knives. So I have resolved that I am going to poison myself. Our house is old, filled with all manner of creatures that should be poisoned lest they gnaw away its foundations, leaving it to crumble. I have become another nibbling rat to this world, and I must be poisoned.
This seems as good a time as any to explain my reasoning for this action. I was born to parents who were extremely good at hiding anything in their lives that did not feed their self image as straight-laced and well off. I was such a thing to be hidden, for although I was born a man, I never knew to which, if any, gender I belonged. I hid myself from them, as much as humanly possible, and on my seventeenth birthday, the seventh of September, I slipped out of the house with what money I had and my few treasured possessions. I heard later that they had tried to look for me, but given up once they realised the benefits of my disappearance.
I left the Stepford Wives world I had grown up in, hitchhiking my way to the coast, for I had always had a love of the sea. I always thought I should like to die at sea, my lover standing on the shore waiting for news of my ship, only to hear that it had gone down with all hands. But this is a romantic death, one that glosses over the actual dying, and focuses more on the reactions and plight of the living. For I have heard of the pain of drowning. I have heard tales of it, where the man who told the tale mimed a horrendous puppetry of flailing limbs and gasping faces, a ship crushing those inside her, in a perfidious display of sickly poetic doom. But again, I have diverted my story.
When I reached the coast, I found myself lodgings by the sea, a dreadful old flophouse in which there was the perpetual scent of wine and French perfume. I couldn't afford even this slum on my own, so I befriended a tenant there named Dorian. Dorian was like a god in that cheap puppet-show world, his cold and spidery fingers gently and artfully manipulating their strings. He had the face of Lucifer as painted by an angel, his dark, curling hair and curved nose so perfect I thought he could have been a statue. His eyes were icy blue, a stark contrast to his swarthy face, a face so beautiful it could have been a goddess's. There was Gypsy blood in him, they said, and they had taught him the arts of being both a man and a woman. I lived with him for months, never asking more than a crust of bread and a blanket by the fire, and he came to appreciate my company, for as he said, the sea is a quiet mistress.
Dorian was a sailor, of the poetic and often tragic variety. He would be gone for weeks at a time, leaving me to watch our dingy room in the flophouse by the sea. When he returned, we would sit by the sputtering fire, and he would take me in his arms and tell me tales of the places he had been. He spoke of India, and spices and beautiful women with skin like night, he spoke of the mermaids that had claimed his fellows and sunk them beneath the waves, never to be seen again. He told me of Africa, with its vast plains and majestic peaks, and I sat, enchanted, as he wove a tapestry of words that brought me ever closer to him.
Mine is not a romantic tale, but Dorian's was. So it was fitting that he should meet his end in a romantic fashion. He drowned at sea, when his ship went down with all hands. It seemed to me a cruel joke, for how many times had I stood on the docks like Desdemona, waiting for my Othello to return, dreaming that someday I would be the Othello, and he would long for my return. I had lost Dorian the way I had hoped to be lost myself, but I was the one standing on the sands of a mighty and unforgiving sea, casting roses to the waves.
After Dorian's death, I could no longer stay in the room by the sea. I left it, taking his coat and handkerchief as well as my own heavy heart with me. I wandered the barren coast for months, sleeping in cheap inns and with rich old men in return for a few coins to buy bread. Those months were lonely, cold and desolate, for I never forgot him, my sailor with Gypsy blood in him and a thousand tales. His memory clung to my dreams and waking thoughts, leaving me shuddering with tears.
A good while later, I found a room at last, and the old woman who ran the boarding house was kind, and asked me no questions of who I was or where I had come from. I stayed there for a year, living off my work as an errand boy for a printer's shop, and for a while I was happy, though Dorian's face was still imprinted in my heart.
When I left that boarding house, I was twenty-one years old, had not a lot of money, and I returned to the sea. I returned to the room that Dorian and I had shared, and sat by the dingy fireplace, which I left unfilled by flame, for had I lit a fire, I would have shuddered with cold, for his arms were not there to keep me warm. I would stay in that room the rest of my life, which is not much longer now. For I sit by the empty grate, huddled in a blanket and his jacket, writing my tale so that I shall not have been thought to have drunk myself to death or some other nonsense. I have stolen some rat poison from the landlady, and she will never miss it. Thus, I bid you all farewell, for I must join my Othello beyond the misty sea. I would hope you do not think me a fool, but if that is all I have conveyed to you, then so be it. Goodbye, gentle reader. If ever you tell my tale, tell it well, and I shall smile upon you from the lands beyond the sea. Goodbye.
To whom it may concern-
Today I am going to kill myself. It is very likely that by the time you have found this letter, I will already be dead. I write these first few sentences to you, simply out of obligation, for I have read and heard too many times that this is how one should write a suicide note. I would wonder how the tradition got started, but I haven't the time or the paper. But I digress. I have thought long and hard about how I would do it, if I could find the courage. I could jump of a building, but I would wonder whether it would be the fall or the impact that killed me. I could slash my wrists, but that would be uncommonly messy. Besides which, I hate knives. So I have resolved that I am going to poison myself. Our house is old, filled with all manner of creatures that should be poisoned lest they gnaw away its foundations, leaving it to crumble. I have become another nibbling rat to this world, and I must be poisoned.
This seems as good a time as any to explain my reasoning for this action. I was born to parents who were extremely good at hiding anything in their lives that did not feed their self image as straight-laced and well off. I was such a thing to be hidden, for although I was born a man, I never knew to which, if any, gender I belonged. I hid myself from them, as much as humanly possible, and on my seventeenth birthday, the seventh of September, I slipped out of the house with what money I had and my few treasured possessions. I heard later that they had tried to look for me, but given up once they realised the benefits of my disappearance.
I left the Stepford Wives world I had grown up in, hitchhiking my way to the coast, for I had always had a love of the sea. I always thought I should like to die at sea, my lover standing on the shore waiting for news of my ship, only to hear that it had gone down with all hands. But this is a romantic death, one that glosses over the actual dying, and focuses more on the reactions and plight of the living. For I have heard of the pain of drowning. I have heard tales of it, where the man who told the tale mimed a horrendous puppetry of flailing limbs and gasping faces, a ship crushing those inside her, in a perfidious display of sickly poetic doom. But again, I have diverted my story.
When I reached the coast, I found myself lodgings by the sea, a dreadful old flophouse in which there was the perpetual scent of wine and French perfume. I couldn't afford even this slum on my own, so I befriended a tenant there named Dorian. Dorian was like a god in that cheap puppet-show world, his cold and spidery fingers gently and artfully manipulating their strings. He had the face of Lucifer as painted by an angel, his dark, curling hair and curved nose so perfect I thought he could have been a statue. His eyes were icy blue, a stark contrast to his swarthy face, a face so beautiful it could have been a goddess's. There was Gypsy blood in him, they said, and they had taught him the arts of being both a man and a woman. I lived with him for months, never asking more than a crust of bread and a blanket by the fire, and he came to appreciate my company, for as he said, the sea is a quiet mistress.
Dorian was a sailor, of the poetic and often tragic variety. He would be gone for weeks at a time, leaving me to watch our dingy room in the flophouse by the sea. When he returned, we would sit by the sputtering fire, and he would take me in his arms and tell me tales of the places he had been. He spoke of India, and spices and beautiful women with skin like night, he spoke of the mermaids that had claimed his fellows and sunk them beneath the waves, never to be seen again. He told me of Africa, with its vast plains and majestic peaks, and I sat, enchanted, as he wove a tapestry of words that brought me ever closer to him.
Mine is not a romantic tale, but Dorian's was. So it was fitting that he should meet his end in a romantic fashion. He drowned at sea, when his ship went down with all hands. It seemed to me a cruel joke, for how many times had I stood on the docks like Desdemona, waiting for my Othello to return, dreaming that someday I would be the Othello, and he would long for my return. I had lost Dorian the way I had hoped to be lost myself, but I was the one standing on the sands of a mighty and unforgiving sea, casting roses to the waves.
After Dorian's death, I could no longer stay in the room by the sea. I left it, taking his coat and handkerchief as well as my own heavy heart with me. I wandered the barren coast for months, sleeping in cheap inns and with rich old men in return for a few coins to buy bread. Those months were lonely, cold and desolate, for I never forgot him, my sailor with Gypsy blood in him and a thousand tales. His memory clung to my dreams and waking thoughts, leaving me shuddering with tears.
A good while later, I found a room at last, and the old woman who ran the boarding house was kind, and asked me no questions of who I was or where I had come from. I stayed there for a year, living off my work as an errand boy for a printer's shop, and for a while I was happy, though Dorian's face was still imprinted in my heart.
When I left that boarding house, I was twenty-one years old, had not a lot of money, and I returned to the sea. I returned to the room that Dorian and I had shared, and sat by the dingy fireplace, which I left unfilled by flame, for had I lit a fire, I would have shuddered with cold, for his arms were not there to keep me warm. I would stay in that room the rest of my life, which is not much longer now. For I sit by the empty grate, huddled in a blanket and his jacket, writing my tale so that I shall not have been thought to have drunk myself to death or some other nonsense. I have stolen some rat poison from the landlady, and she will never miss it. Thus, I bid you all farewell, for I must join my Othello beyond the misty sea. I would hope you do not think me a fool, but if that is all I have conveyed to you, then so be it. Goodbye, gentle reader. If ever you tell my tale, tell it well, and I shall smile upon you from the lands beyond the sea. Goodbye.
posted by Andrew at 10:19 AM
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