Category: suicidality

early morning 24 february 2023

Stay here.
Stay here stay here stay here
(repeating ad infinitum into the dark,
into the open windows of my car
out to the night
)
stay here
please
so much more for you so much more please stay.

I look out into the night, look into my mind to remember the things that are waiting for me.
please stay.
I know you feel unwelcome but please stay.
I know that you feel that there is no room for you and that you need to be by yourself but please stay.

Please stay.

I smoke and I smoke and I smoke and I smoke
I smoke until finally I find something that makes me laugh, I comment, “thank you, that finally made me laugh.”
knowing that it will only last until it doesn’t.

And now it is gone again.

Stay.
Please.

the rest of forever

This figuring out of things this
Figuring out of how things came to be
Things came to be me how I
Became.

It is overwhelming in every single way in all
three hundred sixty degrees.

It is inwardly and outwardly and upwardly and completely bowling me over and tearing me apart

no it is never too late to learn I just wish you were around so I could show you what I’ve learned who I am who I have become.

Who I am still becoming.

I am sitting in my car and I am smoking and I am shaking and I am full of fear and full of love and they are the same thing.

They have always been the same thing.

As I am parsing all of these things as I am
As I am.
As I am uncovering all of these separate very distinct very discrete things
As I am peeling back the layers and understanding implicitly very explicit differences in things
I am filled with patience and sadness at all the time lost in between then and now.

Knowing that I have the rest of forever to be well.

Having promised you the rest of forever to heal.

I had the rest of your forever.
and you have mine.

1142p 11th december 2021

this late at night
at this time of year
there are some very dark stretches of route nine heading north to home
so dark that i could turn off my headlights

and disappear

there are very few other cars
no lights
i could drift into nothingness
brightness

then black.
Nothing.

the road ahead opens its maw
promising to swallow me whole.
it could be done.
Over.

this void within my chest swells
my brain reels

this is a thing I know, now, filed away.

what do i do now 854a 17 october 2021

my voice, transcript below

I have so much to say to you so much that, um, I just
i keep thinking that

I keep wanting to

I just
I just want to share with you. I just wanna tell you I just want you to see me now. I want i really

and I don’t think you would blame me for where I am. I don’t think anymore that you would blame me for where I am. Because I

depended on you so much

i depended on you so much and
it just took everything away.

you’re
gone.

and everything you did stopped with you.

There’s no one here. To see me doing fuck all.

There’s, there’s no one.

No one to report to.

There’s no one here.

There’s Mojo. He was real happy that
I went to bed at 9:30 and fed him first and got into bed and he came right in with me. And we snuggled all night, got up around six or something for his medicine. And then went back to bed.
Had like 10 hours of sleep sort of

what the fuck am I supposed to do now? what do I do now?

I mean, if I thought there was no way before and then there was but now it’s like everything is used up. I,
i
If I spend the money I have on the car, I will have nothing else.
nothing.
I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.

Shower, head north. Make more stuff I guess.

four years/forty years

Last year I turned off Facebook memories for 2017-2018-2019 for this week beginning today. Today is the beginning of the end. Today is the beginning of the last week that Gary was alive.

So much in my life has changed in the last four years. I am not the same person who I was four years ago. I am not the same person I was forty years ago.

Forty years ago is when my bipolar disorder began to truly manifest in ways that other people could see. When my behavior became outwardly observable. Things that only I could see and feel and experience from age five were finally coming to the surface. The person that I grew into, the person that I became was by necessity, a damaged, broken, angry, fearful thing. I was shaped by my experience, by the storms inside my brain that no one could understand, but the results of which everyone could see.

The person that Gary met, she was a powerhouse. She had divorced her first and second husbands. She was taking care of her cats. She was running her own shop, she had an employee, she was working a lot. She was working out a lot. She was taking care of everything around her. She was not taking healthy self care.

She was, however, manic 24/7 and hella cute and driven.
And on fire.

She is still here, in my brain, part of The Committee. She listens mostly. Doesn’t have much to say anymore, more an observer. She sits back and nods knowingly, joint in hand, smoke curling from her lips. She is Rosie Revisited, captured in a portrait, hanging on my wall. There are times when she does speak, a forceful, if gentle “STOP IT.” I have evidence.

your author. 📷 Gary Hoffman 2002

Four years ago I was forced to stop. I became incapable of movement in any appreciable direction. The formerly driven, push-through-ahead-no-matter-how-miserable-it-makes-you person could not go any further. The “attack wife” had no fight left. I had no accountability to any other human. There was no one there for better or for worse. My life spun completely and totally out of control. I lost things, am losing things I can never get back. And yet…

I have found a new self, a calmer, more even self. I am finding the capacity for euthymia, for a happy evenness above my emotional equator. A firm-yet-squishy pleasantness that exists beyond the edges of what I smoke and carries me through the day and into my involvements with others.

I am no longer miserable.

In voicing this thought, however, there is such exquisite pain for the reality that Gary could have been helped. That perhaps he too could have finally found some measure of relief, as I have. That we just hadn’t gotten here yet in researching. That given enough time, we would have.

We didn’t have enough time. But I do.

I miss you so much.
I wish you could see me now.
I wish you could hear me now.
I wish I could talk to you.
The only thing you can do is listen.

And all I really want is to hear what you have to say.

758a wednesday july 2021

I had to walk back to the counter and put the glass down so I wouldn’t crush it.

I had to not look, because it would have killed you if I had.

I had to walk away and you kept pushing me to stay.

I got angrier, and angrier, and angrier and still you pushed me to stay.

I walked away, walked up the hill, walked through the door.
Closed it behind me.
Sat down.
Screamed and screamed and screamed.

I can’t do this.
I can’t do this, I told you I can’t do this.
And still you pushed me to stay.

I don’t ever need reminding of all of the things that I have done that are my fault that are causing me pain I don’t ever need reminding.

The noise in my head is a constant loop of every single thing I have ever done wrong ever that is constantly causing me pain and shame.

It is going to be a long road back.

I see you, out in the world

I see you, out in the world
flickers of you, flashes of you.
I see your hands on other people’s bodies
I see your shape, under the wrong face
hints of your smile, your wink, your dimples
oh, those dimples.
I see these different parts of you,
I see

you/not you
I wonder what you would be doing if it was me who died
If it was you who was left behind to cope.
Where would you be, in all of this mess?
How would you be?

Who, even.

I saw a man in a red pickup truck behind me last night, driving home.
A man who had a long, scraggly grey beard underneath your mouth.
your hands on his steering wheel
(your truck was blue; I never saw you in it)

the other day I looked up from my desk and saw the body I used to hug
it took every ounce of willpower to not stand up and walk over to not you.

(re)possessed

I am sitting on the damp chair (everything is damp)
It is 3:41 in the morning and in the space where my car usually lives there is nothing but a half a piece of paper towel
I am smoking and I am smoking and I am smoking and nothing is going to soothe this I fear
The woman who comes to repossess my car at 3:24 in the morning says, “I don’t want to embarrass you”
I am not embarrassed
I am defeated, again.

She says, “you have your health” I snicker
Do I? Do I.
“You have a roof over your head”
yeah and a house in foreclosure.
“Just call Nissan in the morning” she says, airily.
Just call.
She says this as if it were actually that easy.
Just call Nissan.
I try to explain that it isn’t that easy.
That I have widow brain and I am bipolar.
At the word bipolar she perks up.
“Do you need to call someone? Are you going to be okay.” wanting to absolve herself of further responsibility
The answer to that is obviously no and no. No I am not going to be okay.
No I am not okay.
No I am not okay no I am not embarrassed but I am desperate.
How am I going to get back to sleep.

It is 3:55 in the morning and everything is damp.

i do not know if I can take being loved this way.

Yesterday was my birthday.
I turned 53 years old.
I spent the entire weekend with people and missing people who clearly love me and who I love so much.
I spent the weekend

I spent the weekend doing familiar birthday things,
Going to the Lyndhurst craft fair as I have done for decades
(maybe half the artists this time, different layout, timed ticketing, all due to covid restrictions)
stressing out from all of the unknowns
(known and unknown, thank you D. Rumsfeld)
wanting so much for normalcy
(but what is “normal”, anyway? I certainly don’t have a fucking clue)
feeling so much that I have to explain even though I know I don’t
It seems like all I have been doing for the past three and a half years is explaining and explaining and explaining because honestly I
don’t understand any of it.
Just when I think I do I get caught off guard and none of it makes sense again.

I suppose I’m not explaining to others so much as to myself.

I miss all of the things that we talked about, all of those things that we never did.
All of the ways we responded to each other, all of the good, all of the terrible.
The contrast, I think,
the contrast is what’s killing me now.
i do not know if I can take being loved this way.

I can say things out loud and
I can say things out loud and not worry about feeling stupid for saying them.
Being made to feel stupid for saying them.
I can say things out loud and not worry about
I can say things out loud and not worry about being instantly and immediately criticized.
I can say things out loud and not worry about who might be on my side.

I know
I know for sure
I know now that you loved me but I didn’t then. I never knew for sure. I never knew from one minute to the next.
You would rescind and retract your love like the outgoing tide.
Snatch it away from me,
away from my

craven, grasping, grubby little paws

I want to forgive you for saying these things to me.
I want to forgive you for this so much.

How can I miss you so much and still be so angry at the things you did to me?
That we did to each other.

I told your sister once that I never really had an accurate sense of your feeling for me, not that I felt I could believe anyway. That I always thought you thought I was stupid and not enough and too much all at once.
That now I can look at the last things you wrote, and know.
I can look at all the small lovelinesses you left behind.
I can look at those things and know that they are real, they are proof.
Not soon enough to be able to enjoy with you, no.

The very desperate need to hold onto them

((craven, grasping, grubby little paws)screaming to the sky to talk to you
for you to hear me

I am trying so hard to do everything I can to be well.
I am still so
I am still so unwell but I don’t feel crushed by having to hold up every other damn thing anymore if only because I have given up on everything it seems)

I can look at the small lovelinesses that you left and see them for the huge gestures that they were. Everything is relative.

I can see the unexplored and forever unknown possibility of us becoming better to each other, to ourselves.
Knowing how difficult it was even in the very best of us
knowing I would not be this person if you were still alive
proving my progress to the memory of a dead man
wanting so much to escape your critical eye, your devastating words
and yet wanting to show you that I am okay
I am not okay.

Yesterday was my birthday.
I felt loved, and cherished, and adored, and so sad for what we never had.
If you could see how people treat me now.
If you could see how people love me now and aren’t afraid to say, to show.
I know you would, too.