#11

I've been pondering a lot, lately. Dispassionately reckoning my life as accomplishments and failures. Weighing, measuring, and finding. I'm strangely detached from the oncept of taking my life. I've examined it from many angles, and considered, dispassionately, the positives and negatives of my own death, by my own hands.

I've come to the conclusion that there are a great many things worse than death. I don't really have fear of deaht itself. Maybe the means of it, from a car crash or electrocution, burnt alive, heart attack. The method scares me, but death itself is something with which I have come to terms.

That's not to be macabre or ghastly, though it does sound as such. I just don't really see the point of livin.g I wake up every day gateful to be alive, of course, but ultimately I look forward and see a big, blank vista. Dotted with loneliness. It is the monotony of my future that scares me. An endless, blank gap between now, and death. WIth such a vast chasm of nothingness left to live, what's the need? Why do I need to live out this life if all I can see is that?

There's a situation made worse by the fact that I can't really tell anyone about this. Not that I can't talk to people I love, but... Imagine bringing that up - "Yeah, I consider suicide on a regular basis. It is a part of who I am, I've thought about it a few times a week for several years, and I'm of no opinion about living or dying." Anyone who has any sense and/or even a grain of love for me would go on high alert and do whatever they could.

I don't need that. I'm not really suicidal, but it's something I understand to be part of the illness I have. Just as the man with a genetic illness fears the wheelchair, assisted living, or any one of the myriad monsters of the future, I know that suicide is an option in my future.l That there may come a time that I lose the battle, and pass quietly into a rest that no longer means I have to fight the challenge of living.

I wish I knew.