how i almost died on the couch

It's strange to realize how much people are willing to overlook. You can be as invisible as you like by making the people around you uncomfortable. You can scream in people's faces and they will smile blankly and praise your vocabulary, not focus on something else but change the subject subconciously, blocking the unpleasantness, easy as breath.

I confessed and no one said a word. And then I felt stupid for all the years I've spent concealing the things in my head. I was flattering myself to think people would care or try to hold me back. It's not that people are disinterested, it's that their minds filter those things automatically. It's kind of impressive.

It happened on the couch, it happened because I was drunk in the dark, tired, sore, defeated. I felt closer to the couch than to other people, the people outside, the people in the other apartments, they all felt like fiction. Me and the couch were real, the same. We were stationary and unchanging, our existances valueless to ourselves. All our days were the same. We endured without hope, silent and ambivalent. We were capable of observation, and that was it.

So I broke from the couch and went to where I'd hidden the sleeping pills behind my computer at another time when I felt too fat (different kind of couchlike) to leave the house. I wrapped my hands around them like they were some light-sensitive insect or a baby bird I was smothering the life out of. They were fully hidden and I lay down on the couch again to think about it. The couch didn't care at all. Not that it would have changed anything, not that the opinions of couches ever hope to.

The music was on shuffle and the succession of songs seemed designed to prompt me to action. I finished a glass of red wine, which was the end of a second bottle. It was Teenage Fanclub, If I Never See You Again. Something happens, a song changes, the wine's gone, I forget. I stand and quick with fear I'll change my mind I swallow all the pills straight from the bottle. They don't even make a sound, they just fall onto my tongue like Tic Tacs or rice, sitting obediently until I take a drink of water and wash them down. And I stand there at my computer where the bottle of water is, taking long swallows, staring at the wall, trying to think. My mind goes yes, no, yes, no.. I find myself wnating to laugh. Crazy doomed laughter. Disbelieving laughter.

It takes me a long time to pass out. Before I do I'm up, talking, walking around. Sleeping pills don't seem to work on me. Maybe that's why it didn't take. Maybe I didn't take enough. I'm no chemist.

And now it's been two weeks, maybe, and it's as good as forgotten. Nobody knows, because nobody wants to. And I wonder if before I leave I'll go to my friendly prescription-happy doctor and tell him I can't sleep. In case it doesn't work out, or in case it does and everything's perfect and I continue to hate myself. Everything in me says yes, do it, you know it's what's needed.

I'm not good at making up my mind. I need to try things before I'm sure of them. But now that I've tried it, I'm pretty certain I'll be ready to go next time. Fall down on some new couch and together refuse to be.