of limestone cliffs and small, near-white forbidden beaches. It fit almost everyone’s definition of beautiful. And yet, the most beautiful view in the world could not stop me from wanting to kill myself.
A little over a year before I had read a lot of Michel Foucault for my MA. Much of Madness and Civilization. The idea that madness should be allowed to be madness. That a fearful, repressive society brands anyone different as ill. But this was illness. This wasn’t having a crazy thought. This wasn’t being a bit wacky. This wasn’t reading Borges or listening to Captain Beefheart or smoking a pipe or hallucinating a giant Mars bar. This was pain. I had been okay and now, suddenly, I wasn’t. I wasn’t well. So I was ill. It didn’t matter if it was society or science’s fault. I simply did not – could not – feel like this a second longer. I had to end myself.
I was going to do it as well. While my girlfriend was in the villa, oblivious, thinking that I had just needed some air.
I walked, counting my steps, then losing count, my mind all over the place.
‘Don’t chicken out,’ I told myself. Or I think I told myself. ‘Don’t chicken out.’
I made it to the edge of the cliff. I could stop feeling this way simply by taking another step. It was so preposterously easy – a single step – versus the pain of being alive.
Now, listen. If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain. To escape a mind on fire, where thoughts blaze and smoke like old possessions lost to arson. To be normal. Or, as normal is impossible, to be empty. And the only way I could be empty was to stop living. One minus one is zero.
But actually, it wasn’t easy. The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that the pain of life has rapidly increased. So when you hear about someone killing themselves it’s important to know that death wasn’t any less scary for them. It wasn’t a ‘choice’ in the moral sense. To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand.
I stood there for a while. Summoning the courage to die, and then summoning the courage to live. To be. Not to be. Right there, death was so close. An ounce more terror, and the scales would have tipped. There may be a universe in which I took that step, but it isn’t this one.
I had a mother and a father and a sister and a girlfriend. That was four people right there who loved me. I wished like mad, in that moment, that I had no one at all. Not a single soul. Love was trapping me here. And they didn’t know what it was like, what my head was like. Maybe if they were in my head for ten minutes they’d be like, ‘Oh, okay, yes, actually. You should jump. There is no way you should feel this amount of pain. Run and jump and close your eyes and just do it. I mean, if you were on fire I could put a blanket around you, but the flames are invisible. There is nothing we can do. So jump. Or give me a gun and I’ll shoot you. Euthanasia.’
But that was not how it worked. If you are depressed your pain is invisible.
Also, if I’m honest, I was scared. What if I didn’t die? What if I was just paralysed, and I was trapped, motionless, in that state, for ever?
I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past – the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers – or from the future – the possibilities we would be switching off.
And so I kept living. I turned back towards the villa and ended up throwing up from the stress of it all.
A conversation across time – part one
THEN ME: I want to die.
NOW ME: Well, you aren’t going to.
THEN ME: That is terrible.
NOW ME: No. It is wonderful. Trust me.
THEN ME: I just can’t cope with the pain.
NOW ME: I know. But you are going to have to. And it will be worth it.
THEN ME: Why? Is everything perfect in the future?
NOW ME: No. Of course not. Life is never perfect. And I still get depressed from time to time. But I’m at a better place. The pain is never as bad. I’ve found out who I am. I’m happy. Right now, I am happy. The storm ends. Believe me.
THEN ME: I can’t believe you.
NOW ME: Why?
THEN ME: You are from the future, and I have no future.
NOW ME: I just told you . . .
Pills
I HAD GONE days without proper food. I hadn’t noticed the hunger because of all the other crazy stuff that was happening to my body and brain. Andrea told me I needed to eat. She went to the fridge and got out a carton of Don Simon gazpacho (in Spain they sell it like fruit juice).
‘Drink this,’ she said, unscrewing the cap and handing it over.
I took a sip. The moment I tasted it was the moment I realised how hungry I was so I swallowed some more. I’d probably had half the carton before I had to go outside and throw up again. Admittedly, throwing up from drinking Don Simon gazpacho might not be the surest sign of illness in the world, but Andrea wasn’t taking her chances.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘We’re going now.’
‘Where?’ I said.
‘To the medical centre.’
‘They’ll make me take pills,’ I said. ‘I can’t take pills.’
‘Matt. You need pills. You are beyond the point at which not taking pills is an option. We’re going, okay?’
I added a question mark in there, but I don’t really remember it as a question. I don’t know what I answered, but I do know that we went to the medical centre. And that I got pills.
The doctor studied my hands. They were shaking. ‘So how long did the panic last?’
‘It hasn’t really stopped. My heart is beating too fast still. I feel weird.’ Weird nowhere near covered it. I don’t think I added to it, though. Just speaking was an intense effort.
‘It is adrenaline. That is all. How is your breathing. Have you hyperventilated?’
‘No. It is just my heart. I mean, my breathing feels . . . weird . . . but everything feels weird.’
He felt my heart. He felt it with his hand. Two fingers pressed into my chest. He stopped smiling.
‘Are you on drugs?’
‘No!’
‘Have you taken any?’
‘In my life, yes. But not this week. I’d been drinking a lot, though.’
‘Vale, vale, vale,’ he said. ‘You need diazepam. Maximum. The most I am able to give for you.’ For a doctor in a country where you could get diazepam freely over the counter, like it was paracetamol
