It feels like this isn’t a choice, the increments being so small. Plus it’s not like you’re scooting yourself along: the grade is negative, sloping away toward the precipice. You’re just sitting there. Yet you’re moving. You’re moving towards it, and you know that one day you could fall, you could sleep-walk your wrists right into a razor.
This is the trick of intertia, the devil of it, the lie. You are in fact voting with your inactivity, working on a building with every moment you refuse to resist. (Now there’s a catch-22.) No, you didn’t make life this shitty; this is not your doing or design. But that’s not an excuse against undoing. It doesn’t give you license to check out, or more precisely, to let your safeguards against go fallow.
Of course, you don’t know this yet, and you won’t for a long while. You string together weeks with cigarettes, days with labor and nights with trysts and misses. You’re betting that the sensory overload will eventually pay off, leak into your work, but your work just seems to be treading water. Sure, there’s a sometimes-flash of dramatic flail, but you’re not waving, you’re drowning. Music, that miracle, the only beauty left from when you were young, has gone from a bullhorn to a dead horse to a locked-tight secret, a thing you do in a basement, into a machine.
And so one night you are far from home, and someone in your band puts this CD in, and this song hits you like a silver bolt, instant frostbite on your heart. In college, you knew all about the seduction of suicide, described by Keats in those odes you wrote about…but you hadn’t really felt it until now. Sad songs say so much. Toll booth, white line, sodium light, monoxide. Go ahead, sit there.
Temptation is the part of hitting bottom they don’t talk about. The sirens really are gorgeous, prettier the closer you slide towards them. You choose not to choose today, repeat tomorrow, repeat again, and every day you do that, the siren’s song grows sweeter and clearer. It sounds something like this.
