The Game

 The alarm on my cellphone is going off.  It’s incessant buzzing against the table where my head is rested makes it impossible to ignore.  The device might be as pissed about it’s existence as I am about mine.

I lift my head up from the table and reach out for the phone to slide the timer off.  I lean back into the rigid kitchen table chair that I’m sitting in and observe what’s in front of me.  There is a 750ml bottle of Wild Turkey Rye, it’s a quarter full.  The cap is laying on the table next to it accompanied by a “Virginia is for lovers” shot glass.  The vibrating phone from hell is to my right just above a Sig Sauer p226 9mm handgun.  Creep by Radiohead is playing in the background.  I know exactly what I’m doing.  I’m playing The Game.

I look over to the left of me.  There is a giant iMac on my wrap around corner desk. I stumble over and shake the mouse. The screen lights up.  I check to make sure that the directory with my suicide notes is open.

The letters are all in individual directories named after the people they belong to.  I would fantasize about encrypting the directories with passwords.  The passwords would be all lowercase and made up of three words that are intimately related to our relationship.  Then I would put a plain text file in the  directory containing them all explaining how the passwords work. I would explain that this was the only way I felt I could ensure a certain level of privacy in their distribution.  Then people would continue to try and decrypt their letter by guessing passwords throughout the rest of their lives.  Hoping to finally learn what I had to say to them.  In reality however I just left the plain text files exposed in their individual directories.  I was afraid that people might just putz around with them for half a day and give up.

I walked back to the table.  The gun didn’t look cocked.  This gun has two different trigger pull pressures.  10lbs if it wasn’t cocked 4lbs if it was.  As wasted as I was I knew I’d probably be clumsy in handling the gun.  Somehow knowing it wasn’t cocked made it seem relatively safe to pick up.  I put my hand on the gun carefully to avoid a misfire.  I picked it up and walked over to the laundry sink in my basement.   I bend over the edge of the basin and place my head and shoulders as far inside as I can.  I try to find a good angle where the bullet would go through my head but still be high enough on the side of the sink that the blood wouldn’t leak out.  That way when my body weight falls forward into the sink what’s left of my head will sit lower than the  exit wound the sink will sustain.  This will allow the blood in the upper half of my body to drain out into the sink and save the person who finds me from discovering a genuine mess.  Being this considerate all the time is basically what got me here in the first place.

Killing yourself is a genuinely difficult task.  Logistically everything is thought out here.  It’s a dramatically depressing scene.  Music reminding me of my lack of place in society.  Use of hard liquor.  Suicide letters.  All wrapped up in a dark basement half lit using fluorescent bulbs (fluorescent light are the truly depressing part).  All of this and my heads in a dingy fucking basement sink.  Still it’s hard to shut off the voice in the back of your head saying “This is it?  Why do you need to punish yourself?”  Thanks brain. Now you choose to be on my side?  I’ll never get you.

I press the gun to my head and close my eyes.  With a 10LB trigger pull it’s surprisingly hard to shoot yourself by accident.  You can lean your finger into the trigger a good bit before it will fire a round.  Slowly the trigger slides back as the pressure against your finger increases until suddenly the pressure falls out from under your finger and slams completely back.  I’m hoping that being drunk will help me clumsily cross the finish line where my heart fails to continue.   My finger, somewhere in the swing of the trigger pull, is balancing the weight of my transgressions against the potential redemption of my future.  Surprisingly my future wins.  I stand up and stumble back to the table in the center of the basement.  I pour myself another shot of whiskey and throw it back. I reset the timer on my phone for 10 minutes so I know when to try again.  Then I think about how I got here.

Have you ever been in love with two people at once?  I have.  It’s called polyamory.  People choose this sensation willingly.  Unfortunately, at this point in time, I haven’t heard the term yet and I hated this sensation.  I, buried in my conservative marriage, am in love with two women.  Without getting into the how or why let’s just say it’s easier to do accidentally, than say, kill yourself.

I found myself struggling with this condition of my heart conceptually.  I hadn’t crossed any of the concrete vow lines.  I hadn’t cheated in any physical sense.  I just let my guard down to someone and saw how beautiful this person was amid all the chaos that was stomping through my life.  She became this manifestation of what being alive looked like.  My wife, having stage four cancer, was rapidly becoming the manifestation of death.  This isn’t an excuse. There are no excuses in the christian world I lived in.  We talked about grace but it seemed in reality all we had was condemnation.  This was my personal “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”.

The real problem with being in love with two people, assuming all parties haven’t consented to it, is that you’re definitely going to lose one of them.  More than likely you will lose both.  I can’t genuinely write the sensation of that level of anguish.  Pick something you love in pairs.  Parents? Murder one of them to save the other.  Children?  Pick one to slaughter in order to preserve the other.  No matter which move I made I was going to lose and I was going to lose hard.

There was no settling my mind.  The best way I can describe it is like the two halves of my brain were actively ripping themselves apart.  One half choosing logically my commitments to the person in front of me, with who I endured both hardship and joy.  The other half choosing to imagine what a better life could look like when it isn’t steeped beyond bitter in this current state of suffering.  There was a burning sensation in my corpus callosum.  The guilt of even having these thoughts weighed on me constantly.  What was I going to do?  How can I resolve this?  How can I choose to give one of them up?

I spent a lot of time contemplating how I could sneak around my vows.  Tip toe around in the dark to see this person.  I knew though, that I’d never be able to tell the lie.  Not that it seemed I had to.  We would all three sit on the couch and drink wine while we would pretend none of us saw what was happening.  Was I crazy?

I even brought it up with my spouse like a good boy.  Not an easy topic to broach.  There was an immense sense of shame but I had no idea what to do.  We sat there and I explained what was happening in my mind and in my heart.  I did my best to be forthright hoping we could come up with a plan together.  This was a gut wrenching experience of basically attempting to give this person up.  It didn’t seem like I could give them up though.

My thought process went something like this.  I love both of these people in different ways but just as intensely.  Adultery is a sin of two people.  Divorce is a sin of two people.  But ultimately this was my problem.  I couldn’t let go of either of them.  I couldn’t move forward from where I was.  Suicide is a sin of one person.

The alarm on my cellphone is going off.  It’s incessant buzzing against the table where my head is rested makes it impossible to ignore.  The device might be as pissed about it’s existence as I am about mine, but then again, maybe not.