It is said that immediately after you decide to take your own life there is an eternally unfurling moment within which you become briefly and illogically bound.
Just after you make the slice, the swallow, take the leap and even within that minuscule moment of a mechanical oily click that occurs between a released hammer hitting powder.
It is said that there’s a regretful moment wherein you find yourself outside of time itself.
And in that frozen irreversible moment you are both blessed and cursed with fractal holographic sight as you begin untethering from the flesh.
The moment after you choose to check out, disoriented, you’ll strangely, impossibly see yourself through the tear-blurred eyes of whoever it is that finds your uncanny valley mess of flesh broken, bloody, odd angles and clay skin with your dry milky eyes staring at nothing at all. But you do see, in that wretched and stretched moment just as you are turning yourself off, you see through their eyes, that they will never not see you like that for the rest of their life because of that fateful moment in which they discovered that you had deployed a permanent solution to some temporary problem.
You’ll see your parents in that dreadful slow motion moment just after you take your own life and how they seem to crack and crumple and somehow psychically implode from the supernova of sudden and incalculable grief and your proximity to their pain will cause your own previous lamentations in that inescapable viscous moment seem like a mere candle flame held against their terrible blazing black sun because you decided that you didn’t want to do this life shit anymore.
In that eternal and frozen moment in which you are voluntarily and inexorably exiting your life you will hear the crushing words about your death as they are gently spoken into your child’s ear. You will feel their existential equilibrium irrevocably destroyed. For you were their planet and they were your moon.
And sure, maybe your orbit wobbled and wandered a bit. And yeah, maybe you never learned yourself how to be the most hospitable planet to your loving little satellite.
But you were the gravity of their entire fucking life and in that eternal incorporeal instant as you melt away at the speed of light you strip them of the atmosphere of their innocence and you cast them adrift to forever search for, but never find, a new ellipse in what seems to suddenly have become a very lonely and very hostile void.
In that nightmare moment, after your child hears that you abandoned them forever, they will cry. They will deny, then bargain. Shortly thereafter their own guilt will consume them as they begin to remember and regret every terrible thing that a child says to their parents in that natural and appropriate way that they do when testing and learning and growing into their own autonomy and you will be there in that perpetual pause desperately but silently screaming at them ethereally impudent and unable to console because you gave up body and voice.
And in the lethargic hypnagogia of certain death you will helplessly watch as the memory of you is reduced in their subconscious esteem and sequestered into the shameful depths of their own mind hell within which you are represented as nothing more than a skulking demon trapped in a cage comprised of their own pain.
And as you recede from this world you will take with you the terrible knowledge that your child will hate themselves for incarcerating you thus, for you were their everything, that you permanently reduced to nothing.
In that fractal moment just before you die the gossamer strings of identity will unravel from the moment you destroyed space-time and those tendrils will reach out and connect with every single person who ever loved you and you will simultaneously view the hologram of all their lives and how, for most of them, their grief for you will turn to anger and even hatred because those are the only two things that they can find that are strong enough to cover up the pain and feeling of worthlessness ignited from the belief that you didn’t give enough of a shit to stick around for them.
In that moment as you spin dizzily between life and death you will feel yourself slam into your best friend’s mind in the form of deepest guilt and you will manifest as an echo that never stops mournfully moaning within the attic of their skull.
“I should have known. I should have seen the signs. I should have said something. I should have done something. I should’ve fucking been there this is my fault. “
And although you eventually move on, deeper into the darkness of your own death, part of you will live as a ghost in their mind that perpetually haunts their happiness until the day they take their own life because the guilt is too much and it’s the only way they can banish your spectral memory from the haunted mansion of their mind.
In that moment, that moment in which you are abandoning your body and are stretching towards the eternally retreating horizon as nothing more than a greasy rainbow smear of light you will feel yourself violently detoured and pulled into the actual beating heart of your most beloved and like poisoned blood you will know the corruption that you have wrought as the sludge of your sudden passing pumps through once healthy tissue turning it into black and cold leather from the tainted touch of your final action on earth.
And even after this never-ending fucking moment finally fucking ends and the memories that you used to define yourself lose cohesion and scatter like wayward photons towards the mystery, somehow, you’ll still be in there, in them, because they cannot let you go yet, not like this. And although you’ll be dead and long gone you will still impossibly find a part of yourself looking through their lonely eyes for their loneliness is the byproduct of the contagion of a poisoned heart and because of that single decisive moment wherein you gave up- you cursed them to become unable to truly give their heart away again because who would want such an astringent and bitter thing that they believe their heart to now be because of your abrupt and utterly complete abandonment.
But if they do love again, it will be a fleeting daisy chain of cold and distant loves because the memory of your ultimate betrayal will be there like a festering rot under their ribs until one day they finally and completely eradicate you from their heart as they cast you into the river of forgetfulness so that the phantasmagoric memory that was you becomes soluble and thus indistinguishable from the dark waters of oblivion.
In that quantum and endless moment of ultimate regret as the light is leaving your dying brain your mind fabricates a vision in which you seem to be driving maniacally out of control down a dark and twisted mountain road until even that image is fractured and your consciousness is ejected and naked of body and brain and utterly alone you then find yourself racing electrically towards an abyss through a tunnel of sickly nebulous light and you try, oh how you try to stop your momentum as you reach out to claw the ethereal walls with fingerless hands and…
(Inhale) There’s a thump as you feel yourself land, almost violently, back into your body. Light stings your eyes.. you.. awaken in your bed. You’re.. you’re ok you’re fine. The memory of the moment that you decided to end it floods back into your mind as does the subsequent terrible fucking dream in which you spookily scattered throughout the orbiting lives of your life and upon finding that you still live and that your breath still pulls the atmosphere into your breast tenderly like a reunited lover, your relief and delight is palpable and profound.
You’re confused at first, then astounded that you actually made it through that dark night of the soul and you did the thing you didn’t want to do, which is- to live. And deep in the wrinkly pink meat of your brain a bit of fatty tissue called the mid cingulate cortex literally grows a few microns, as it does, when you do things you don’t want to do and although you don’t really know that or how it works, you do feel it, you feel that that part of you that governs willpower and the will to live is now literally a bit bigger and you feel a bit… better.
And those problems that hitherto drove you to the brink seem so much lighter now in the light of day compared to the darkness and the incalculable pressure that the dark night of your death would have blanketed upon so many overcasting their lives with the clouds of despair.
And the day after your thwarted demise someone tells you how much you mean to them, out of nowhere.
You see the world anew and, it’s fucking beautiful and it’s fucking terrible, a miraculous tempest of duality and you get to be there for a minute, in the eye of that strange and wonderful storm of experience.
And out of the blue someone comes to you as if magnetized by your own existential relief because they are also so very weary and tired of this life and being pummeled by its circumstantial winds and drowned in its hormonal tides and you gratefully find yourself uniquely situated to be there for them and to help.
Not because you have any grand epiphanies or advice. Not because you are suddenly a sage or a chirping Pollyanna. It’s because you actually fucking get it, you understand and they feel heard in your understanding and it makes them feel less alone.
And you tell them the only true thing that can be told with language which is that- life is like weather. If you don’t like the weather, wait a fucking minute, because it will always, always, always change.
**And you point out to them that sometimes the default story that we engrave into the neural hallways of our mind that tells a fabricated tale of self-pity that we then recycle and recite and: “you don’t understand my life really does fucking suck” you point out that, that is just a bullshit electrical loop in our fool head that prevents us from experiencing the dualistic polarization of experience of life’s beauty and terror from running through and purifying the circuits of our system because we shunt all the sensory data of life through this closed neural loop of “woe is me” and we become addicted to the brain chemicals of our own misery because a familiar narrative which blames something or someone else bizarrely seems easier than taking responsibility and learning to know thy fucking self and we become totally blind to what life actually fucking is.
And you see in their eyes a kind of relief because they know you’re not bullshitting them. They can tell that you’re not regurgitating someone else’s flowery words for the sake of self-aggrandizement nor are you spitting braggadocious lies about your superior endurance. They feel your strength because you’re not afraid to expose your weakness. You’re not building them or yourself up, you’re breaking it all down, all the bullshit that we tend to stack so impossibly high. You tell them that your own tower teetered and it toddered and the greatest peace you’ve found yet is when you finally let it all just fall down.
You see their body relax with the resignation that life will suck, and then it won’t, and then it will and then it won’t, again and again, like a crashing experiential tide.
And in their lowest moment they will decide to stay until the next moment because of you, and every wave-like trajectory of their life’s potentiality will ripple throughout the pond of time and every possibility of joy and pain will spin off like branching helix’s from that moment off into the unknowable multiverse so that the great and wakeful nothingness may continue to know itself through their somethingness.
And they confide to you, much later on, years later, that simply learning that they could just wait it out was absolutely everything and that it taught them that by watching, by observing their own emotional, psychological and situational weather they eventually fucking got it, they came to see the one thing that’s true, the one true thing that no words can convey.
As you listen intently, they explain how they became resilient and even intimate with the emotional storms of life and the torrential tears of rain and how they became grateful, but not attached, to the sunny days and warm fragrant winds and even the mundane overcast and becalmed moments of stale and bored air were full of grateful awareness. They said it was by enduring and observing, that they realized that they are not the changing weather, they just thought they were before. They thought they were their fucking thoughts.
They tell you with a twinkle that in fact they uncovered the truth of themselves, the now ridiculously obvious truth that they are in fact the immutable and cognizant eternal fucking sky within which all thought weather occurs. They are the wide blue field of wakeful awareness which cannot be affected by the worst of life’s hurricanes or tempted by the suns soothing and beckoning heat. They exclaim with shock and delight that they now can enjoy it all equally and immeasurably as a paradoxical participatory witness. They discovered, no, they uncovered, that they, that we, are a vast self-cognizing system that vacillates from simple to complex, from ignorance to enlightenment and back again and oh how suffering itself was the rocky road to that realization.
And because you stayed, they stayed and the universe was able to fully express within the circle of both of your lives and the expanding torus of your and their continued existence merges with and intersects uncountable other expanding fields of life that you have touched or will touch and who have or will touch and pluck your singing vibratory strings of awareness with their conscious notes of regard creating the melody of relationship that weaves itself through the song of embodied existence.
You just didn’t know that the discordant strums of your own suffering were required to make the song of life deep and meaningful by way of its contrasting mournfully vibrational notes. A singular bright melody cannot contain the extraordinarily complex hymn of a life truly and fully lived.
And simply because you didn’t, instead of did, thus continues your iterance of experiential expansion of conscious existence as it folds in and unfurls back out like slapping cosmic sails of experiential motion over and over again ad infinitum and weirdly, you are somehow seeing all of this shit.
And what a fucking relief too because you now inherently intuit that nature leaves nothing undone, nature demands a closed loop and, uhg, I’m so glad I didn’t fuck that up, but wait..
A fog bleeds into the edge of your vision. Reality becomes a sideways blur as your head violently hits the cold unforgiving ground or the bathtub’s edge or the wall behind you with a blunt crack.
And as your life force ebbs and your eyes grow dim and you are finally fading away you remember that there is no coming back from that singular decisive moment in which you decide take your own life.
And perhaps within the dwindling electricity in your brain or maybe, just maybe the diminishing quantum pulsations momentarily still carry just a bit of the memory of you being a “you.”
And in that last fading moment in which you misguidedly surrendered the most miraculous and rare gift of this tiny temporal iteration of a human life, as the border of your identity becomes stripped and transparent and permeable- while you are still a wisp of you, you find yourself on the event horizon of the infinitely deep expanding and undulating honeycomb of eternal experiential existence and although your dimensionally bifurcated astral vision is vast it becomes stretched and snaps in its attempt to glimpse just the tiniest fraction of the luminous terror that is absolute reality and you are hurled, now fractured, deeper into the primordial cosmic conscious soup of existence.
As you fade with ultimate regret you briefly see the wonderful and terrible conscious machine of ultimate reality itself and how it cranks and recycles and demands completion like a resplendent infinite holy snake whose each scale holds uncountable universes blindingly luminous eating itself in endlessly pulsating circles which twist into cascading figure eights.
And just before the film of you is wiped clean forever from this plane of time and window of space you see the multiverse open its oceanic mouth as it coaxes the drop of itself you though was you from the now twisted and ended timeline of your interrupted life, at the edge of final coherence is that terrible blazing mouth opening up to tear and swallow the plasmatic substratum of you into endless iterations and countless other versions of your previous pain that must be undergone again and again until finally, you figure it the fuck out.
It’s not a punishment. You just glimpse it, before the obliteration of memory and ego, that it is an ineffable fulfillment of an unspoken eternal contract that you signed before there was a you and before time itself first ticked or even the tiny fold of this entire universe ejected wraith like from one of the countless atoms of the ultimate mind, the whirlpool black hole apertures who slowly sucks inward swirling and eating entire galaxies only to violently shit them out into new dimensions of endless possibility.
In that folded and warped endless moment after you proclaimed that it’s fuck this shit O’clock you remember that you came here on purpose to play the human game on hard and with horrified recollection you know that the all-pervasive gamer of primordial and pure awareness behind your dying avatar eyes will just divide and respawn your astral ass into some even more fucked up life until you learn to stop resisting what is.
With fractal awareness you download the dualistic law of completion that the singularity demands of every iteration of its shattered self before it can again yolk back into itself. A lucid emptiness filling itself up only to shatter and yoke again and again creating new tiny universe bubbles of time and space as its popping undulations manifest and collapse throughout eternity.
If only there had been someone there for you who understood who could reach into the darkness and pull your ass out. But there wasn’t.
It’s ok- because there’s no such thing as too late when you are timeless. And perchance have you noticed that all of a sudden here you are, back into a moment, this eternal fucking moment, with a head full of memories that tell temporal lies of identity and seem to imply a life apparently lived.
Here you are again back in the fucking now driving a meat tractor called “me” to try it again.
It’s never too late when you’re timeless to stop blaming the persistent illusion called reality and claim agency of your own current existence and to grab the fucking reins of the wild horses of thought that pull your consciousness cart crazily and wonderfully down the weird and winding road of this current life.
Universes are being created and destroyed whilst you lament that no one is there for you.
Of course there’s no one there for you, there is only you, but, I know that’s hard to know however, by swimming your alleged self out of those cold and deep depths of this difficult sea of divine suffering in which you contrived to drown in, by swimming yourself to the surface using the buoyancy of your own determined and raging will you can then, with authority, be that person that you didn’t have, for another expression of the ultimate you that you think of as someone else and you can now do that because congrats, you learned to swim you figured it the fuck out.
You don’t have to have compassion not at first, not for a long time, you can simply be pissed off that anyone should have to suffer as you have. You can be angry at the very fabric of reality itself and rebel and rip those threads of pain born resistance that are woven within and throughout it. You can become lovingly fucking furious at the very concept of suffering itself and like a vengeful earthbound Boddhisattva with wrathful fire in your blazing heart you can set the fucking world on fire with that one simple choice, the choice to stay, not forever, not forever, just for now.
And perhaps after you’ve burned the scourge of suffering throughout all the ages and epochs and iterations and lifetimes and have become lucid within the one dreamer’s dream of reality, perhaps then, you’ll reward yourself and you’ll get to know what compassion feels like. You’re starting to remember that you are infinitely patient.
Or, you can obliterate it all, this mythical simulation this entangled hologram this play of delight and terror and take with you everyone you love and who loves you as you collapse this reality with that other choice and become chewed up and recycled back into the celestially adorned gears of matter to again pretend to become a singular electrified meat golem made entirely of emptiness and stardust to start the weary process of contraction and expansion and ultimately evolution of awareness itself again and again ad fucking nauseum.
You may not feel that you have enough buoyancy of self-worth to swim yourself up and out the sea of suffering by yourself. But you don’t have to do it for you. You don’t even have to do it for those who love you or whom you love. You can do it for one single poor drowning soul that you haven’t even fucking met yet, you can be that hand that pulls them towards the light of day so that they do not have to suffer the selfsame frigid depths within which you’ve drifted for what feels like ages. To help surface them to again weather the storms and dry out in the sun of experience as is our cyclical proclivity. Is there any greater fucking boon to give than this, the alleviation of existential suffering?
From the very depths of your own drowning you can cast your hand up and foreword into the future, which is still just a now, to save some motherfucker that you don’t yet know and may never even truly meet in order to pull yourself out with the same arm that pulls them and in that decisive moment of ultimate will there is no time, and, space folds in on itself and the surface of the sea of suffering is no longer linear or horizontal, by your will alone it becomes bent into an impossible vertical crease and in the equalized gravity outside of temporal existence itself- who the fuck is actually pulling who into and out of what exactly? And the “you” that’s in the “now” and that stranger who is really kinda you, but you call “them” in their “now” that you call “then” in that timeless decisive bubble- you save each other, you pull yourself out with an unknown arm that reaches into the past that is your now. And thus the rescuer becomes the rescued through manifest intent and unwavering aspiration.
Reality is a slowly melting and slowly freezing undulating liquid made entirely of light and lucidity. It will always change, always. You are an undying, unending all pervasive conscious signal of Beingness temporarily being picked up by a meat antenna called human. You are a human being, which is to say that you are Beingness currently and briefly being human. You just got a little caught up in the human part so, take a breath, you’re taking this funny little play that we’re all playing at, a little too serious, that’s all. You’ve got this. Not because I say so, because you fucking say so. So, say so.
