The Suicide of a Suicide Note
Brandon Kubinak
I hate cutting things short. Not finishing something bothers me—not just mentally but physically. I get this draining feeling when I leave something that is not completed, but that’s how I was raised.
My mother had crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder. She could never leave the room without turning back to check the lights. She could never enter the house without checking if the car was locked three times because twice was never good enough. The backdoor handle broke off because she always shook the living hell out of it.
It was a miserable childhood sprinkled with highlights. She would try to make me an accomplice to her disorder. I would always disobey. Why should I get up to check if the door is locked if I knew she would not believe me and go down and check it herself? Every time I challenged one of her compulsive ticks, I would get yelled at, be called “rude,” “pathetic,” and then I would be sent to my room.
Her behavior escalated after my father died. Shockingly enough, it is not hard to go back and find where my source of anxiety and obsessive compulsion came from. Right down the genetic family tree from her fucked up mind to my own. She has been long gone, and nothing really has changed. Dad died, my relationship with my mother died, and I’m dancing with death every day of my existence. It is actually a funny sentence: to be “dancing with death.” More like I got up and asked death to the dance floor, and we have been slow dancing ever since. I wouldn’t say I’m suicidal, but I probably should be. Life genuinely hasn’t treated me the best; a lot of people devalue the tragedies of others because they have not personally experienced tragedy themselves, but this is why so many people like myself feel isolated.
In 12th grade, my first real girlfriend cheated on me with my best friend at the time. We had made it together for one year, one month, and fifteen days. Then, her air conditioner unit broke, and she just had to go “cool off at my friend’s house.” I found out what actually happened through the latest gossip, and I wanted to vomit. That one sucked; one could say it was just a high school relationship; everyone gets over those. But it was my first taste of betrayal.
A theme that would recur in the personal screenplay of my life.
I then found myself super interested in this girl. We were like the last two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We fit perfectly, but things just so happened to not work out. My other friend at that time took interest in her, and I asked him politely, as friends, to please stay away from her. Later in the year, I found out that they slept together.
Not just heartbroken, I had also lost another person who I thought was my friend.
I finally graduated and found someone I was interested in, but we already understand the theme of this suicide note. Like a maple tree, I was tapped for intimacy with no aspirations of anything more. Used, I was left standing by myself, in shambles. I started college, and nothing better came out of that experience. It only left me in the hole one hundred thousand dollars with another heartbreak and a slandered name.
My college heartbreak was different. I learned from my past “mistakes” with women and tried to improve from them. We met at a dorm event in school. She was my RA, and she was the greatest girl; we talked all night, and I got her number the next day. We talked for weeks, and eventually we slept together. She was paranoid about being an RA intimate with her resident, and we had to leave what fire we just created behind. She would text me later after school ended, and we rekindled the embers that were left over from the previous go. It didn’t end well.
My therapist claims that this girl, without trying, was gaslighting the relationship and me. Gaslighting, in case you do not know, is a form of mental abuse. It was a constant cycle of me doing something, her yelling at me and dragging me through the shitter for weeks until she “forgave me;” then, the cycle would just repeat itself. I constantly felt like I was never good enough in general. I was such a fuckup to her, and I genuinely thought she was the one. This made me change myself in such drastic ways to try to fit myself into her likings. I changed my clothes, my hair, my glasses, my jokes, my cologne. I dumped my friends, and I was still not good enough for her. I lost everything that I found meaningful because of her. She still texts me every so often, and when I see her name it shatters me. I can’t stand seeing her; the sight of her ruins my day. I feel like it’s a bottle of Jack to an alcoholic. They know that Jack Daniels won’t help their situation, but that drink tastes so good. She visited me at work the other day; her, her sister, and father came to get a tree, and she didn’t tell me. She just appeared out of nowhere, and I was forced to act normal. I wanted to cry. I started to hyperventilate and ended up having a panic attack. I left work early that day because of her. She keeps saying how she thinks so much about me and how she wants me to come see her and her dog.
I would rather see how fast a body can reach full velocity when being tossed off the Brooklyn, maybe try and go for a world record.
See, the problem with me is simple: I’m a fantasizer. I get my hopes up, and I expect things to go a certain way, and as we all know, they never do go the way you hope. The difference between you and me is when something doesn’t work out, it is a blow to the gut for me. It is becoming unbearable to live like it was for Rocky when he was oppressed by the Russian. How am I supposed to journey forth into this world if every step of the way I am being beaten down and left behind? I think it’s reasonable to contemplate suicide, and if you are one to say you’ve never thought about it, I would call you a liar. What is life without suffering? If there’s a place without it, buy me a first-class ticket.
I genuinely could not tell you when my depression actually started. My therapist mentioned that there is a difference between perpetual sadness and depression, and I cannot tell you when my mind un-boarded one plane for the other. Apparently, I’ve been “self-harming” for the past nine-ten years according to the therapist, too. Didn’t even know I was doing it, but did you know biting the skin on your fingers till they bleed is subconscious self-harm? And to top that off, I started to bite my nails after my grandfather died; it was almost jump started by the obsessive compulsive disorder.
I picked up weed for the mental morale boost. Honestly, it’s one of the only things that kept me on the Earth. My anxiety gets so bad sometimes I can’t even sit still. I remember my first time smoking weed. It was like being in “Space Oddity,” by David Bowie. My friend told me to take a hit from the joint, and he counted me down just like the song. As he counted down from five, I just remember making a mental transfer from this world to the heavens. Things got light, my head heavy, I was high. As I exhaled, I figured out why people actually did drugs. That feeling was why. It was almost like a suit of mental armor, protecting me from the issues I had been facing for so long. Years of restless sleep, sadness, anxiety, all packed up and shipped off with the smoke I just blew out of my lungs.
My main problem with suicide is the way you are going out. It is all a mess. A majority of depressed and suicidal people say they just want to “disappear.” Just cease from existing, no dying, no funeral, just reenacting a Houdini routine and disappearing into thin air. This is where a lot of my thoughts go: how am I going to die? It’s weird, a person spends their entire life wondering when the day will come when they kick the bucket. Not just about when they will die, but about how will they kick that bucket.
It interests me, the whole perspective, of you picking the moment of your demise. It reminds me of this comedian’s standup routine. He was talking about wanting to kill himself, and he named numerous types of ways one could dispense themselves. One being “an attempt at the highest amateur swan dive” or the crowds favorite “seeing how long he could keep the fork in the socket.” It was a fascinating take that one could assume the role of “god” by picking their own fate.
I was never a religious guy. Honestly if God wanted another devout Catholic, all he had to do was give me a sign.I would’ve fallen right into line if he did. My ass would’ve been in the pew every Sunday, but it seems like my prayers are going straight to the holy spam folder. It would certainly suck if I off’d myself, and all that religious stuff happened to be true. It would be kinda ironic. With all the religious mush in the world, either one theology is true or none of them. My therapist was once talking about Buddhism. We were knee deep in a religious conversation almost like we are now, and she taught me some of their beliefs. Suffering is self-caused; caused by desire and ignorance. The craving for pleasure, material goods, and other like things all leads to a never-ending cycle of never being fully satisfied, which leads to more suffering. Maybe that is where my problems lie. I wanted too much. I injected myself into a cycle. I was becoming an addict to desiring things. Desiring love, attention, wanting to be liked, wanting to be understood— these are things that never can be fully satisfied. I have been setting myself up to fail from the beginning. I think I need-