A Bad Day
For one is less bad than for someone else
(Warning: Death by suicide)
Look, we all have bad days. I got out of bed the wrong side. I know this because the first thing I did was step barefooted on a chip of dog bone, causing me to limp and curse my way to the bathroom. Standing over the bowl, I remembered how urine once flowed like a waterfall, and now I can recite the Lord’s Prayer before the first trickle hits the pond of water. I washed my hands and turned on the shower…letting it heat up while I brushed my teeth. Rubbing my hands over the stubble on on my cheeks. Screw it. It can wait another day.
My hair, once a chimney-brush of thrush brown, now stands up like strands of white sea anemone floating on my scalp. Having showered and dried the parts I can reach without hurting myself, I went back into the bedroom, carefully minding the shards of dog bone, and pulled up the bedclothes. Who cares whether my bed is made or not? Maybe tomorrow, when the family arrive. I throw on a pair of shorts, add a ‘t’ shirt, and go down the spiral stairs. Reckless, my companion sheep dog, is waiting to greet him, his tail no longer a brush of activity, just a gentle sweep of a greeting. “Damn you, Reck’,” I said, rubbing the old lad’s neck, my foot still sore from standing on the piece of bone.
Breakfast is always pretty much a non-event. I put the kettle to the tap, filled just enough for one cup of tea and a little extra for warming the teapot, and placed it on the stove.
Outside the kitchen window the Pacific Ocean stretched wide, coming to the shore in petticoat waves. That’s when I saw him. A young man standing on the edge of the cliff. Dangerously close to the edge it seemed.
He was standing motionless, so still he could have been sketched there, in that very place. Not real, just a sketch in my imagination. I turned off the heat under the kettle, rested it back on the stove, pulled on a sweater, and walked out. I will respectfully request that he leave. He’s probably oblivious to the anxiety his presence creates inside me. For months now, only the sunrise has called my attention. Sometimes I hear the Beach Goddess calling, her bones dancing, jabbering and moaning, tempting all who hear her.
Such comfort she offers.
I stood across from him on one edge of a crevice. Ninety feet of nothing to the rocks below and ten thousand differences. He had undressed, stripped naked, staring out toward the ocean; clothes piled at his feet. There was no light in his eyes, just emptiness; the same kind of emptiness you see in the eyes of animals held in cages.
“Look,” I said, “even if you take a real hard run, you won’t clear the rocks below,” stating the obvious.
He gave no intelligible response, no sign of life, but for his fingernails scraping blood from his thigh. I made a further observation. “Mind you, the best thing about not clearing the rocks below is that nothing will ever hurt you again. That’s a plus.” We stared out at the horizon. She’s got him; I thought, the Beach Goddess, murmuring her comforts, the same voice I heard so well. But I was too much of a coward to listen. She’s convincing. Telling how life is nothing more than pleasure and pain, pain mostly, hurt that first grips your chest and then rips your heart out with delinquent ideas about love and happiness.
He made the slightest of movement. That momentary flap of hesitation a young gull might when making its first venture into the sky. It prompted me, nervously, to state another point of view.
“By design, so that you know, life is not intended to answer every sorrowful question. The sadness you are feeling right now, I’ve felt. The calling you hear, I have heard.”
It was impossible to imagine what this young stranger was thinking or what his perspectives might be, standing precariously, as he was, between life and death.
Different perspectives have impregnated my thinking like stab wounds. They changed over time because of books, death, war, love, a mushroom cloud of happenings and events, many of which could have cheerfully passed me over.
I didn’t want this young man to leap to his death, not because I cared about him, I didn’t. The reason I interfered is simply a matter of selfishness. If he leapt from the cliff so close to my home, I would be dealing with the intrusion of police, sightseers, and then, God forbid, the family mourners. I’d have a week of people coming to see the rock from which he jumped, crying, leaving flowers, screaming how they didn’t know things were so bad for him.
Does he wonder what’s going through my head? Does he care? Of course not, he’s too wrapped up in his own insecurities. Couldn’t he go through this hateful stuff somewhere else? I can’t fathom why he’d want to contaminate the frothy excitement with the red of his anguish. Does he not know that his chosen demise won’t get a mention back in the concrete world of barking dogs, traffic signals, two wheel bikes, and mad butchers with cleavers?
No-one is going to care whether he had transsexual therapy, too many martini lunches, or if his car failed a roadworthy test, or even if love had been an illusion. He had come seeking out my beach. Did he know how many beaches there are and how many are better suited to his present frame of mind? So I waited while he stood naked against the wind, staring out to sea, and at that moment we had no understanding of each other’s perspective on life. We were like ill-fitting dentures up against the gum of reality. He shifted nervously. A few granules of dust flew away.
“So that you know, I’ll not report the fact you jumped, if that’s your intention. Oh sure, someone will find you in the days ahead, it’s a kind of unwritten law; the Beach Goddess eventually gives up what doesn’t belong to her.”
At that very moment, the temptations of the Beach Goddess must have spoken more sense to him, promising to take away his fears and his doubts. Clothes, like a memorial on the cliff top, were all that remained of a life once walked there.
I walked back to the cottage, into my kitchen, turned the gas on under the kettle, and wondered why it was a young man had found so much more courage than me?
A couple of days later, flowers bloomed where such flowers should never grow. They won’t last, and once they are gone, the shoreline will become mine again.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
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