flight.

she cried when she saw
the sparrow on the sidewalk
wings spread
tiny body
crushed by a stranger
no doubt not looking
no doubt not feeling
feathers plastered to their shoe

she cried not just
because it would no longer fly
but because
it still had wings.

thrive.

planted in soil
once a million ancient trees.

roots driving deep
through the stubborn fallow peat.

leaves pushing out
drink the light at blazing noon.

petals unfold
toward the free, unending blue.

sting.

You start by wondering how much humor should punctuate what you’re about to write. Because right now, you’re still not entirely sure who your audience is and you’re used to using parody as a crutch.

Then you remember you’re talking about suicide and the answer becomes quickly apparent.

You’re still trying to figure out if this is your note or your reprieve, if this is the turning of the valve that releases all the pent up pressure or the rotation that seals it in for good, if this is the rope that will hang you or haul you out of the icy river of what everything feels like right now.

You wonder how you got here, which is around when the introspection unfurls with the ferocious kinetic energy of a released spring, as if your psyche has been salivating to unleash a State of the You address, but all in bitter strokes and muddled imagery.

~

You realize that this is, in part, what it feels like to stand at the edge of the end, what it feels like when Nietzche’s abyss feels closer and whispers louder than the Christian contemporary worship music pumping in your headphones, the songs that are so ubiquitous in your life till now that you wonder if maybe the heart of their intent got buried somewhere in your overflowing Spotify playlists.

You haven’t written in months because you’ve grown tired of your voice, feeling like it’s always at best a smidge dishonest, touched up too smartly for your faceless readers because you’re scared of sounding vulnerable but you loathe yourself for sounding fake. Unfinished projects litter your hard drive and the web like elephant graveyards, populated with the remnants of bright sparks of inspiration and creative passion that have burned out faster than you could harness their heat.

You struggle with questions, angry, painful, silent questions, about identity, and sexuality, and family, and destiny. Your life is equal parts faith and fear and facade, though you long for the first to take the reins.

And then you start seeing yourself where you never expected to, like in the news articles about “high-achieving students, who seemingly have everything to live for” who have just taken their lives, in your city, no less. It is sobering at first, and then downright chilling.

You have no desire to suggest you comprehend what they were going through, but you have some different goings-through of your own that are startlingly similar.

High-achieving? Check. You might dispute whether you deserve to be here, but objectively, you’re hovering just beneath a 3.5 GPA in a rigorous chemical engineering program that will ostensibly culminate in dual bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Weeks from graduation? Check: in fact, just this morning, you registered for your last term. You even posted about it on Facebook. You seem excited for the future, which, you surmise, will shock everyone if you decide not to pursue one. Popular? You don’t want to even start thinking about that one.

Depressed?

You recoil at this label because you know you should be feeling blessed, surrounded by loving family and friends, a strong community of the kind and honest and fun and generous, attending a great school on a great scholarship, not hungry or homeless (you didn’t even lose power in the latest local ice storm, for crying out loud). You have tasted the nearness of God, the joy of timeless memories, the warmth of loving and being loved. Things are, by all accounts, absolutely wonderful.

Which is precisely why you despair to feel the emptiness of emptiness building inwardly upon itself when everything should be happiness and gratitude.

You’ve been growing reticent, withdrawing from others. It’s enough to afford a quick smile and a couple of laughs, to pretend that everything is just fine. The term “feeling like a burden” is an accurate one, alienating you from honesty because, like, aren’t there people with real problems to worry about and care for? And isn’t that what you should be doing, which is what you are failing to do, and why are you wasting so much time thinking about yourself when there is so much caring to do for people with actual needs? Get better at loving. Stop feeling.

You want the impossible: to convince people that you’re totally okay, before they read your mind and deduce that you’re not. You succeed at the former. They fail at the latter. You can’t hold it against them, so you hold it against yourself.

You don’t know what depression truly looks like, but this seems pretty close. And the fact that you are “high-achieving,” that your life seems so happy and alright, makes you feel doubly like a sham.

~

It’s a late night, one of too many lately, as the workload has increased and the motivation has proportionally waned, when everyone has gone to bed and you’re physically alone in a tiny room, when you really, truly, boldly stare into the abyss.

It stares back.

It seems alive, pulsating, enticing. It promises a twisted version of everything you long for.

Release from the stress, and release for everyone around you, who no longer need to worry about you or your problems. The ability to make an impact, because it doesn’t really matter how you go, you think, they would write about you, and there would be ripples of sadness, and people would remember all the good things about you and not the pathetic things, and then maybe those ripples would turn into actions and change things for the better for other lonely people too, right?

You get to the point where you contemplate, clinically, methods. There is a river nearby. There are parking garages. There is a pharmacy. There is a strong, hefty hook.

Again.

~

But there’s something this time, against the odds. Something that makes you steel your feet against the false heroism, against your heart’s willing desperation, that makes you scream at yourself that it’s not a good enough reason to propel yourself into the beckoning arms of the encroaching void. Because — and it’s so funny, isn’t it? — even though you want to jump in because of everyone else, you want to never jump in because of everyone else.

You think about the crippling grief that will overtake those who love you, the most painful part of the story, the chapter that those who have taken their own lives can never truly understand. You never kill only yourself. Everyone who loves you dies that day, in the tangible sense that they cannot help becoming someone else, someone far more dead because a part of them has died, someone who now bears a burden a million times heavier than you ever imagined you were.

Your social media feeds are punctuated with mourning from all corners of your acquaintanceship, and how would it make things better to pour more sadness into this broken world, this cup already overflowing?

Mass murder is not on your bucket list.

So you schedule counseling, get help, take responsibility, reject solitude, push forward, neither ignoring nor despairing the lack of answers for the endless questions but owning them as a stepping stone to whatever comes next. You feel the hole but don’t let it engulf you because, honestly, that’s never been the best way before for anyone, so why should it be for you? You resolve to embrace with new fervor all that is beautiful and joyful and good in the lives of those around you, with a firm hope that one day you can feel those words come to life in yours again.

You think you’ll start by writing like you can’t remember ever writing before, plunging into the honest depths of your soul without a crippling worry about what might be said, and you wonder how much humor should punctuate it, because you’re still trying to figure out if this is your note or your reprieve.

So far, it’s turning out to be the latter.

~

There are chapters when you cling to faith by the barest of threads, trusting somehow that there is still a reason for you to be here, and you can’t help thinking it’s not my grip that’s keeping me here, because I would have let go by now.

This is where I am. With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

respawn.

In faded grids

and six-second shards of life,

and frozen timelines

and the incisive brevity of one hundred forty keystrokes

we become polygonal soldiers

in a high-definition campaign

actors in a glowing basement screen.

resurrect when obliterated

and run past our own scattered digital limbs

in search of another elusive victory 

all over again,

striving for levels 

always 

just out of reach.

ebbing.

It’s tough to think back on the days when Bryan and I were best friends, just because everything looks a million times better in light of the fallout. Somehow, memory has a way of discarding the imperfections, offering up instead an inordinately pristine slideshow of sensory overload, five-second clips with too-bright lights and amplified laughter.

We’re at Bryan’s uncle’s lake house in '05, sitting on the gray wooden dock, fishing lines drifting as aimlessly as typical mid-afternoon conversation between fourteen-year-olds. Bryan turns to me and asks me if I know how to play Wonderwall on guitar yet, which is his way of keeping me accountable because I'd promised to teach him once I learned.

The air hangs thick and almost wetter than the seaweed swaying in the ripples beneath our toes, and the sky is the kind of blank paper gray that means there's literally a storm on the horizon. I say something clever. Bryan half-smiles, the way that always meant he was amused and trying not to show it.

Then we're back to the present, the approaching thunder echoing into the cavernous emptiness of a fading reminiscence.

spectator.

whatsername's not guilty,
thought she was a lock.
angry people congregate again.

who just won? i think he
was a guest on 30 Rock?
love that show, I might have seen him then.

whoa, they found and shot him
and they've got it on TV.
gory stuff! how crazy! is that live?

wow, they've hit the bottom.
screw these rising fees.
how do they expect me to survive?

they've released a new one?
i just got the old!
why's this always happening to me?

can't wait for this season!
that guy could be gold,
guess i'll tune in every week to see.

tradition.

The world is a great and a beautiful thing,
held together in one sense
by a thousand invisible forces --
magic that finds expression
in the symbols of language
passed down from generations
to indicate and illuminate the intangible,
made comprehensible through the
streamlined care of human intellect
tasking itself to know.