Yesterday I seriously considered taking my own life. Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about how this was an exit sign, a real way out. Now I realize that it is no more than a doorway into another room, you still reside in the building but cannot see through the wall to the ones you love; those who love you.

You see suicide keeps you close enough to touch. Years will pass without healing because no words make your absence coherent, there is no easy disease word to swallow like cancer or crohns or complications. When you die by suicide you are immortalized by sadness, already depressed friends who will still mention you to their therapist in passing thirty years from now, with sadness, with cracking levee voice. Your pain lives in them now.

When my hands became more knife than weeping pen I called my bestfriend, asked 'why, why do you love me? How, how can you love me?' With laughter in her voice and heart in her words she explained and explained again,
"You are loved, you are cherished, you are worth loving. I won't give up on you. I love you."
In this she shared my pain with the first few men who did not make me fear my body, who gave an out pouring of love I still cannot comprehend. Even a stranger who still sees me faceless except for a few kind words, told me I was destined for more than this, more than a bloodied ending.
I'm holding all of this love in a lock box beneath my heart, the kind of stash I don't really need to hide or fear seeing the bottom.of.

Yesterday I was seriously considering final words. Today I am working on what I will say some future day to the friends who fought distance and depression to give me a reason to promise to stay.