How I Tried to Kill Myself (And Live to Tell)

I woke in a ditch covered in my vomit. My head hurt and the sun was just glassing over the night in the east above the Sandia mountains. At first I wasn't clear on why I was in this position. The vomit stank. I puked. I turned over and knocked a bottle against my arm.

I staggered home while it was still dark shedding my clothes as I walked. Crawled back into my room in my underwear through the open window and struggled to cleanse myself of the dirt and stink without waking the house.

Years later I would marry a beautiful girl who had tried to kill herself 3 times before our paths crossed. For years we had traveled in the same circles neither of us ever meeting each other or ever knowing of the other. It was like we both orbited directly across from each other. Only able to see the blinding sun between us.

She told me that I gave her her first orgasm. She was raped in a stairwell when we first began to date. I never knew until our marriage had imploded. She told me that as he pushed into her into the wall he hurt her and she came in great urgency. I can feel that wall as I write this.

We danced to the Happy Mondays Bob's Yer Uncle when our relationship was young. She rode my cock to that song as though she were Sunny Garcia surfing down a steep tube. We danced, laughed, and screamed
"He's gonna step on you again man he's gonna step on you!" as we came. There was a stain on the wall that I remember; I want that to be where he fucked her, in silence. Her cries stifled.

When I decided to kill myself it was late at night. I was 14. I was watching NightLine. The story was about a national convention of suicide doctors. My dad and I did not get along. He came home from Vietnam a stranger and although we walked in the same house we did not introduced until I was in my 20's. When he walked in and screamed at me and the tv that night I snapped inside. After it was quiet in the house I stopped crying.

When she went after me with the knife I moved my arm without a thought and knocked it from her hands. Afterwards when she screamed at me that I was dirty little faggot and that I would surely die before God would allow me to spoil my child I fell into an asthma attack and lay there helpless on my back. She is a great rending wound in my eye. When I look that way pain takes my breath even now.

For months I went in and out of the hospital with a mysterious illness. Some sort of unidentified virus ravaged my system. My ears were ravished and from my swoon I often could not walk. I spent weeks in wheelchairs finding myself a stranger in my school and a novelty among my friends. I never stopped doubting that I somehow was making this happen. I began to mistrust my mind, my instincts. School was never the same after that.

When the police came to take her away it took several hours to talk her down out of her delusions but in the end she shed her clothes, her wild unbrushed mane sticking straight into the air, screaming and running through the apartment while our daughter sat on the couch and watched and I listened through the phone. As we sat on the concrete patio at the neuro-psychiatric ward several weeks later she told me she was unhappy. She said she loved me and wanted us to try again. I said no.

When he was 7 Ben Kerschberg knew he'd someday attempt suicide.

Posted by filchyboy at July 17, 2003 11:46 PM | TrackBack