This story is heavily inspired by the incredible song Random Rules by The Silver Jews and by a man whose life changed after hearing that song. 

TW: suicide attempt, drug use

One decade ago

Some roads lead you away and never lead you back. For Steve, one of those roads was death. He had taken the bus down this road but must have gotten off a stop or two early because instead, he found himself in a hospital. He had spent his whole life in a romance with the afterlife, but that night, the reality of life hit. Death is three things, just as there are three fates and three furies: painful, confusing, and lonely. 

The first and most real aspect of the experience was how much it hurt, how excruciatingly and slowly the premature shutdown of the adult human body clicked onwards. He felt every limb go electrically numb as he began to become paralyzed. His head was full of the loudest TV static, his chest drumming ever so faintly, his mouth foaming so that he could fathom breaths. 

Then it was confusing. His thoughts went in a circle. He wondered if he should play a memory montage but could not fathom any memories in his deteriorating, buzzing brain. He wondered if he should think of a song he likes but could only think of a commercial he had heard on the car radio that day. He realized this might really be it. He thought about how much effort it took to breathe when his throat was inhumanly dry and his heart rate was inhumanly slow. Then, again, he wondered if he should play a memory montage but could not fathom any memories in his deteriorating, buzzing brain. Et cetera. 

Finally, death was lonely. If I can talk you out of death for any reason, let this be the one. Steve had experienced loneliness in life, a chasm so gaping that he understood he would never cross it. But this loneliness is all-encompassing, the forest around you, the guarantee that you would be surrounded by buildings in Manhattan, and that they would obscure your view of the sky every time you look up. He remembered that before his eyes became paralyzed shut with the rest of his body as he started to fall into a coma he would be rescued from, he had seen Elaine look at him. She looked angrier than he had ever seen her. He managed to tell her that he loved her. And she looked even angrier. At the hospital, they electrocuted him back to life and pumped his stomach. He had not even felt it. He would be shitting charcoal for weeks afterward, though. 

*

I’m sorry to start the story there, but that’s where this vignette starts. Death was not the one-way road he was seeking, so instead, he drove from California to Brooklyn in his beat-up second-hand Prius and called it a day. The highway to hell had been replaced with the drive to Dumbo. I will tell you one of the mistakes that Steve makes, and has always made: he romanticizes death. Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther is not a bible—it’s a warning. 

I will tell you now that there is nothing romantic about death. I know. ...