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Falling | Dec 11 2002

PILLS scored the highest, followed by OVEN. Then came GUN, JUMP, and finally DROWN.

DROWN scored half as much as PILLS, seventeen to thirty-three. This surprised me. I knew DROWN wouldn’t win, I knew it didn’t stand chance, but seventeen points?

I think it’s because of the ocean.

I think it’s because the ocean’s right there, because I’m always hearing it and seeing it and smelling it. This is why I thought of including DROWN when really there was no good reason to do so, as evidenced by the score it received: seventeen points out of a possible fifty. An average of three-point-four on a scale of ten.

Even JUMP, which I knew would do poorly, did better than DROWN.

In defense of DROWN, it did win the OTHERS’ PAIN category, I did give it the highest score in that particular category, figuring that there was a chance, however slim, that my body would be swept out into the ocean where it might—who knew?—be eaten by sharks, in which case no one would ever have to find it or face it: an ideal result.

Don’t get me wrong, I never actually thought this would happen. I just thought it might, that if all went well it might, which was more than I could say for JUMP.

With JUMP I knew for certain that some unfortunate person or persons would be forced to encounter my body on the sidewalk. Not to mention the fact that I might been seen falling. All of which is why I gave JUMP a one, the lowest possible score, in the OTHERS’ PAIN category.

By comparison DROWN received a seven for OTHERS’ PAIN—an excellent score. However DROWN was not helped by the fact that I weighed OTHERS’ PAIN lower than the other two categories, counting it for half as much as either MY PAIN or CHANCE OF SUCCESS. But even if had I weighed all three categories the same, DROWN still would have scored the lowest overall, despite the fact that I gave it a seven for OTHERS’ PAIN.

My point of course is that I never should have included DROWN in the first place.

The same goes for JUMP.

Neither JUMP nor DROWN belonged on the list, since I was never sincere about including them.

*

How do you drown yourself anyway? How do you prevent yourself from keeping yourself afloat when you’re there in the ocean with the ocean all around you?

I can see getting tired. I can see having your arms become so exhausted, so leaden, you literally can’t lift them anymore. But I can’t see not using them to begin with, I can’t see surrendering like that, giving in like that, no matter how much you want to.

It’s like holding your breath. You can’t accomplish anything, you can’t get anywhere by holding your breath. At some point you’re going to breathe again. You can’t decide to stop breathing and then stop.

Of course when you jump, once you jump, it’s over. You fall. But with the ocean, the ocean holds you up. It pulls you down and holds you up.

*

It’s the falling that scares me. It’s when you’re in the air and you know that it’s over, that in four or five or however many seconds you’re going to run out of air and hit the pavement.

What if in that moment, in those moments—this is the question I ask myself—what if you change your mind? What if in falling you see you were mistaken, that in all this time of wishing, you never understood what you were wishing, but that now, falling, you understand?

No doubt this happens all the time. Because how can you know anything—I mean really know anything—until you’re there and you’re falling?

You can’t.

*

What’s worse is that they’re all falling, at bottom. Because there always comes a point at which you pass the point of no return. From that point on you’re falling. Even drowning is like falling. Even shooting yourself.

Of course with shooting yourself you’re only falling for as long as it takes the bullet to leave the gun and enter your head. Which is what, a hundredth of a second? So it’s a kind of falling you never experience.

Unless time slows down at that point to the point where you have time to think something. A single thought like, say, I did it.

Or more like, I—.

I

What is a thought less than I?