There was obviously beauty but I couldn’t see it. June 26th, passport in hand, I decided I was going to die. There were no mental checklists, no inventory of items to remain after, or to salvage. No will because I owned nothing but myself. I could have lost the whole damn bag. Boarding pass, cigarettes, phone, charger– now useless because I was convinced I would die. A lone cig, maybe three gin spritzes, benzodiazepining into extinction. Ativan. Hard to come by. Xanax? Too expensive. Valium? I’d have to take too many. Then again, perhaps too much is precisely the point. It wouldn’t be a graceful death. But it didn't necessarily have to be the opposite – if I could just sleep fast enough.
Then came the panic.
Was I going to seize instead? God, I’d been drinking a lot. So, a seizure wasn’t entirely out of the question. I was more concerned with the logistics of the event than the event itself – it couldn’t happen around too many people. If I was going to go, I’d really like to go. No ambulance, no activated charcoal, certainly no pity. I was factually dead. But metaphysically alive. I’d been fucked hard, become unfuckable. Which also made me unfuckawithable paradoxically. The banality of dying, like the banality of the evil before it, had given me just enough courage to make what was once elusive possible.
In my head, I’d already done what I needed to, now it was about being prepared. I didn’t want to be fucked anymore, not then. But I still desired beauty. To be somewhat contained, at least, even in my decay. Because I had been dishevelled, but to die dishevelled, is a whole different story. I brushed my hair for the first time in seven months, eight long hours, the knots slipped through my fingers and became air. A horse’s mane emerged from the nest, smooth. Like pushing a cue ball into the corner pocket of a billiard table. I wish it had been that seamless. I thought I looked like Cher. I hate Cher. That might’ve been the final insult. How naked I felt, and how bald. I’d lost a lot of hair by then but was still resolved to not go to the salon. To be witnessed in my discomposure was too much to bear. To be witnessed is to be evaluated is to be listed, and memorized.
To have a lady at the salon, all kohl and vocal fry, rummage through all the dirt in your hair – to find lint, a raisin, two rogue hair ties swallowed in the mass, to ask, sweetheart, what the hell happened to you? And I had no answers. So I brushed it myself. The swollen bits on the scalp where I’d scratched too hard, broken a nail. Dandruff patch right where the skull met my ear, nicotine womb; that was the underbelly, the hair under the hair. But the truth, of course, is that I was not meant to survive. I didn’t think I’d need the hair.
It was the December prior that I had decided. A long, exhausting countdown – all the way to June. Then June arrived, inevitable and smug, and I discovered I was still very much alive. I slept for three weeks after landing, short breaks in between – toilet interlude, convenience store trip, greek yogurt and more cigarettes. I did not like anything. My reflection least of all, once so self-assured, now spoke back to me. The self unfurled.
I was back in the car, a Corolla 2000 something, staring without blinking. I imagined scrolling through unread emails and Instagram. I didn’t do either. The car felt deserted; I surveyed my surroundings blankly, counting what I saw instead. A kid maybe seven, selling balloons, matte and slick. A man on a motorcycle, five Persian carpets strapped to his back. A woman with bad highlights clutching a Chanel white flap bag, waiting for a: taxi, boyfriend, dealer. I think I liked the man most.
At the store, I stood around like an idiot for thirty minutes. I bought cranberry juice, omega-3s, biotin, returning to the hair. And that is how it ended. Not with a whimper, or a bang, or a dirty martini, not with white powder, not in bed, nor outside of it. Just the irritating awareness that the end had not ended at all. The lungs just kept inflating, with air, with breath, with life, stupidly anatomical. I tried so hard to die and all it did was make me more alive. I believe in getting the job done. I believed I’d get it done. And here I am.
Unfinished
