I left two notes. I left a note for my family and friends and loved ones. It was short. Then I left another informational note for the cops. The note to the cops was a red flag to them because it wasn’t a sentimental thing, like, I’m looking for help, it was, like, please call the following people. It was just numbers of people that they would need.
The other note was very short and just said that I’ve been very lucky to have received so much love from so many people and I was really grateful and I didn’t mean to hurt anybody but I couldn’t deal with it anymore and I had this sickness for twenty years and I was sorry. But that it wasn’t anybody else’s fault because they’d all been way nicer to me than most people get and certainly more than anybody deserves or anyone has any right to expect. I felt very privileged and so I didn’t want to send that love into a bad place, but of course I did. What else could you do? I don’t know. It didn’t make sense is what I’m trying to say.
I went to sleep and then I hear a maid banging on the door and I’m like, shit, I set this up on purpose. They said that the maid would not come at the normal time, but now they’re interrupting the thing. What if I get discovered? What I didn’t understand was that it was actually more than twenty-four hours later, the maid had not come by mistake, it was the next day, and nobody knows why I was alive at that time. I wasn’t supposed to be. I shouldn’t have been but I was.
I didn’t know that it was the next day and I just felt like, fuck, this is going to interrupt it, and I tried to talk my way out of it so as not to be discovered. I tried to hide the notes, but I was on so many benzos that I was barely coherent. Anyway they eventually found me at my house, so I don’t know if the hotel threw me out and I was like, “Fuck, where do I go now?” I just wanted to lie down and let the pills finish.
My neighbor April saw me on the street and apparently I had been trying to open the door but couldn’t work the key because I was so sedated that I could barely stand and I could barely talk normally. And she’s like, “You okay?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m fine.” So she said, “All right,” and she left. Then she thought about it and she came back and I was still fumbling with the key and then she said she noticed that my shoes were on the wrong feet and that I had a bloody nose. I don’t know if I fell, I must have tried to throw my clothes on real quick before I answered the door at the hotel, I don’t know. But I don’t remember having the wrong shoes on my feet or hurting my face. Maybe I fell down while I was staggering home.
Eventually, my roommate figured it out because he.…
He noticed that the cat food was on the floor open where the cats could get it and that’s what.…
That’s what made him figure it out.
That’s the other thing the note to the cops saidb. It said, “Please, my cat’s at home, but.…”
You know despite this self-serving nature of the other note—“it’s not your fault, don’t be hurt by this, it’s really all for the best”—the fact is, I left the cat food on the floor for the cats to eat so that when nobody fed them they’d have some food before somebody discovered them or whatever. But I did abandon the cats. Writing on the note “find my cats at home,” I abandoned them and these little guys depended on me, and I abandoned everybody else. I said thank you for all the love they’ve shown me, but I didn’t show it back. I abandoned them, and that’s why now I know it was the wrong thing to do.
But when I woke up I did not think that. I was very upset that I had been found and was not in the hotel.
The way I look at it, I didn’t choose to come into the world the first time, I found myself in that circumstance because my parents had sex, and it was the same way this time at age forty. I think of it as a second birthday. That’s what I call it with my friends or whatever because I didn’t choose it any more than I chose the first one, it was not anything I would have opted to do, but I found myself in that situation and so many people showed a lot of love. And I thought, well, I can’t disrespect that, it’s too special of a thing and it’s too rare of a thing in the world to take what little of it there is and transmute it into pain by abandoning all those people trying to tell you they love you.
I mean, when I finally checked out of the hospital, I had nothing. I had not really changed my mind about anything. I wasn’t really wrong about the circumstances that were going on at the time. Everything that was going wrong was in fact going wrong and continued to go wrong, but I had two things. The first thing was I had decided all these people’s love was worth preserving and therefore I had a will to live. But I didn’t have a desire to do anything. I had no idea what the future would hold. That whole first year all I did practically was sit on this couch every night and I had my cell phone and I would just call and if I didn’t get anyone on the line I’d leave a message and call the next number, and if I didn’t get anyone on the line I’d leave a whole bunch of messages and then somebody would call me back. I would lie here on this couch holding the phone like a teddy bear, waiting for it to ring, and if somebody called back, then I’d cry on the phone with them, and if nobody called back, then I’d cry alone, and it was like that for a long time.
All those people coming to see me, they were all trying to cheer me up and I was just arguing with them. They were all like, it’s going to be okay and I’m like, you don’t understand, it’s actually not. But they were right and I was wrong. A component of mental health is a slight inability to see things accurately. You see people who are mentally healthy consistently have a slightly higher opinion of themselves than they’re actually worth or they think that their life is a little bit better, or they think some looming disaster isn’t as bad as it really is.
I just wanted to say I’m sorry to all those people. It’s a selfish thing to do to take people’s love and not give it back, and if you abandon them, then all of the investment of love that they gave you, you’ve just transmuted into pain and it’s not fair to them. Not only do I thank all those people, but I also apologize to them. I have said this to all of them many times and they’re sick and tired of hearing it, to be honest, but I just thought it was important to say not only thank you but I’m sorry.
And it will not happen again.
FAILURE
“An Uppercut Right to My Feelings”