Snapshot: August 15, 2005

I sat on the cool steel beam that night, staring down at the railroad tracks beneath the bridge and down the tracks to the lights of town. It was still muggy out, as Augusts in Ohio tend to be, but the haze had lifted enough that I could see the stars. I looked down at the tracks, followed them back to the lights of town, and looked up into the night sky and sighed.

This was the very same bridge I'd come out to with my friends in high school, drinking Mike's Hard Lemonade and dancing in the moonlight to someone's car stereo. Somewhere on this same bridge were my initials in a simple equation with my high school sweetheart's, like so many other jumbled spray paint letters. And now I sat on the steel beam, rubbing the tips of my fingers along the edge of the beam, rusted and worn, debating whether or not I wanted to die.

It had been the worst summer in my life, and I'd been in the depths of a seemingly-bottomless depression. It was crippling, when I was of sound mind. I'd spent the majority of that summer in a drunken, drugged haze, trying to forget how truly hopeless I felt. I'd been on my way to a successful career, and had everything "going for me," as they say. Then at the end of the past semester, my world came crashing down. Details aren't important, but where they landed me was. I was completely and utterly lost.

My roommates didn't know how to handle me. I was the living dead in our house we shared that summer. We'd been so excited to sign our lease just a few months before everything... well, stopped... and now I was a ghost in the house. I slept most of the day, sleeping off the hangover and whatever other chemicals were dancing around my system, and if I wasn't sleeping, I was at work, or at the bar or a party trying to forget it. Then I'd come stumbling home around 4 a.m., collapse on the couch and rock back and forth sobbing to myself until I fell asleep. In the morning, I'd wake up to one of my roommates covering me up. They used to leave me a glass of water and Tylenol beside me, until they eventually gave up. I was hopeless.

"Are you suicidal?" my psychiatrist asked me. She wasn't even a psychiatrist. She was a grad student listening to me, humoring me, for grad school credit. She was a large woman, with a heaping "fat girl" bosom that I often stared at wondering why in the name of Christ she wasn't wearing a bra. She had frizzy blonde hair and wore thick glasses. I imagined she would eventually become a school guidance counselor. Maybe she did. At the time I didn't want to talk to her, and I only talked to her because my parents begged me to go to therapy. All I could think was that she was recording our sessions, and would later go back and hash over them for some thesis paper about how fucked up I was.

"Yes," I answered honestly. Shit, I figured, I may as well give her something good to write about.

"Do you think about it often?"

"Often enough," I said, thinking of times I'd laid in bed wondering how I'd do it. "I don't think I'd ever do it though, I don't think I have the balls. Plus I can never think of a way that wouldn't be messy, but would be effective."

Her lips pursed into a thin line as she nodded in feigned concern. I had already convinced myself she didn't give a shit about me or my problems, as much as I didn't give a shit about talking about them.

And so here I sat on the steel beam of the bridge, staring down at the tracks, maybe a 20 foot drop onto gravel and more steel. I had nothing left. My parents had cut off my funding and demanded I move home, and after a brief period of resistance, I knew they were right. I didn't know what I was doing anymore, but my roommates were sick of my shit, and I was broke. I was 20 years old and felt like I had nothing left. I'd crawled into a deep, dark cave inside myself and had no idea how to get out. It didn't feel like there was a way out anymore. The rock had rolled over the entryway to this cave and I couldn't move it. I didn't even know if I wanted to.

I heard the train coming in the distance. Far down the tracks, I saw the crossing guard go down. The blinking red lights stared back down the tracks at me like some game of visual, mental chicken. I had convinced myself, staring down the tracks, that I was going to jump. It was the only way to make the hurt stop. To stop waking up every morning hung over but still empty, still lost, still sad.

My car was sitting beside me on the bridge. I'd left my purse on the front seat with my wallet open, so that once someone found me, they'd at least know who I was, and tell my parents. My cell phone sat next to my wallet, with "ICE" ("In Case of Emergency") in the phone book next to my parents' home phone number. I wanted to make this as seamless as possible. The windows were still rolled down from the long drive out to the bridge. I wanted to feel the air around me, wanted to feel alive for a little while as I had driven as fast as my Ford Probe could go. If this was my last night alive, I wanted to feel something. But even now, staring down those train tracks, squeezing the beam and feeling the rust crack off in my fingers, I couldn't feel. I wasn't even crying. I was resolute, I was empty. I was already dead.

I was staring down the tracks thinking about that final push off the beam when I heard it. The tinkling, midi version of "Santeria" by Sublime. My cell phone.

For some reason, I felt compelled to at least see who was calling. I picked the phone off my driver's seat and looked at it. It was my boyfriend, M. I couldn't stand to leave without talking to him. I wasn't going to tell him what I was doing. But to just talk to him one more time -- I owed him that, for putting up with me through all of this.

I sat down in the car and answered. His cheerful voice broke through the silence I'd been sitting in, and we started to talk. I heard the train approach. I heard the train go under the bridge. As the bridge rumbled underneath me in my car, I couldn't hear M on the phone anymore.

I put my key in the ignition. I turned it. I drove away, still talking to him. I drove home. I sat in the driveway and talked to him longer. The conversation ended. I went inside, laid in bed, and decided that I had reason to live. That things would get better, eventually. The next day came, as did the next, and the day after that inevitably came, too. Days became weeks, and eventually, the emptiness filled with pain, and pain became scar tissue and scar tissue healed.

To finally release that pain, I got a tattoo to remember that night. It is a phoenix feather, to remind me of the legend of the phoenix -- the bird that consumes itself in flames, then rises better and more beautiful than before. It's behind me now, to remind me never to sit on that cold steel beam again.