2002-12-16 - 5:03 p.m.
When I was five, I had to be locked in my room for three days because I’d said I wanted to kill myself. My parents confiscated my jump rope in fear of strangulation, my toy cars in fear of choking and my magnifying glass in fear of slicing and then locked the door behind them.
My lil’ suicide attempt wasn’t due to depression, just restlessness. By five, I’d figured out what life was going to be. Wake up, cereal, leave house, return to house, television, then bed. This predictability paled in comparison to the unknown and fascinating world of the afterlife. Ghouls, ghosts, vampires and other dead things aroused my little toddler brain much more than my kindergarten classmates. Everything I’d been told about post-death, even the goody-goody angel-y stuff, sounded pretty appealing: resting on clouds, flying, halos and lots of white that didn’t need to be cleaned. And, besides, dead kids always looked cooler in movies than the living ones.
My parents didn’t think to take my paints away because they were labeled non-toxic and they wanted me to use the medium to paint out my tiny depression. I had a more dramatic use for the paint in mind. Sure, if you eat a teaspoon of the day-glo yellow tempera, your innards will walk away with your innards unscathed, but if you down the entire 1.5 gallon valu-bucket, the paint will eventually dry up in the exact shape of your intestines, clogging all that necessary internal fluid movement. As I licked the last bit from the bottom of the bucket, the paint hardened and I fell to the carpet.
"What are you doing here?," a booming voice asked,
"Um, I’ve come to collect my halo."
"Your mother has made you a fireman sandwich and its getting soggy," the voice replied.
"Well, I’m kinda sick of those, I mean, that’s why I came here," I said.
"What makes you think you have the power to choose if you exist or not? Does the fireman sandwich have that luxury? Go eat that fuckin’ sandwich before it gets soggy."
So I did. I didn’t try to kill myself after that, but I did cuss a lot more. I still have that lovely day-glo yellow cast of my intestines as a souvenir of my trip to the other side.
