How to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills

My room is in a small, wooden cottage in the Adirondack woods. When it rains the roof leaks, drop-by-drop, pearls of water. When they splatter on my floor (is it wooden?), I lick up the little puddles that begin to run to the edges of my cot.

My brother used to live here. He’s dead now; the room is mine. I keep a bottle of sleeping pills on the nightstand beside my cot, just in case I ever need to get out of it. To die, you must shovel handfuls of the things into your mouth, and gulp them down quickly. Just ten or twenty of the things might not do it. To ensure the job gets done, you must lay on your back, so as to induce choking when you vomit. But I’ll save that for later, when it becomes necessary.

Something in me senses that this has all been done before. My life is like a cassette tape that has broken open. Spools of tape are tangled and knotted on the floor. If I close my eyes and look hard enough, I can almost peak into that little stretch of tape just beyond me.

For now, my knees are stiff. I must awaken them when I want to walk, to fetch supper or something. A few hard punches to the thigh will loosen them up nicely, but this only takes you so far. To the mirror, say, where I can look at my gray, matted hair and curse myself under my breath. I don’t know why I curse myself under my breath. Perhaps if I say it too loud I might hear me. Am I there, in that mirror? I don’t want to know.

To walk to the toaster and eat, that is something else entirely. If it is not raining or too sunny, I might make it. I hobble a few steps and fall. To get back up, I grab a chair leg or a lamp stand. It takes a while, but once I get to my feet, I fall again. This advances me a few steps, maybe a yard at most. When I get close enough, I crawl. I can only use my hands, naturally, as my legs are already dead by this time.

Something in me senses that this has all been done before.

Mostly though, I choose not to go to the toaster to eat. The bread is usually moldy anyway. There’s a boy who comes every week and brings a stale loaf. Charity, they call it. He smells like orange juice.

So I lie in my cot and chew off bits of a pencil. I keep a stack on the nightstand. I start with the wood around the graphite. Then I devour the graphite, then the moist, pink eraser, and finally the metal that joins the wood and the eraser. The whole process takes about a day. I raise the thing to my mouth, clamp down with my jaws on the side of my mouth, bite off a piece, and suck on it. The juices are fresh at first, and when it dries up completely I swallow it.

I have 17 pencils left on the nightstand. When they run out, then what? I will have to stop writing. I suppose I could ask the boy to bring more, but what would be the purpose? To go on? That makes no sense.

Something in me senses that this has all been done before. But I’ll save that for later, when it becomes necessary.