at time's final tide

the night i killed myself, the avocado continued to rot in the fridge, because that's what happens when you kill yourself. your time stops, but mundanity continues.

the night i killed myself, i saw familiar cars in unfamiliar driveways, dropping me off and turning around and reckoning with the rest of the place i had asked them to navigate. perhaps that place was my home.

had been. the night i killed myself, i ceased caring about a rent payment due the next day, or in a week. and who was going to tell the landlord?

my laundry done, my internet canceled, my phone shut off.

would it be these stodgid details that drove me away? or would it be all that i hadn't seen, all that i couldn't see?

all that i couldn't control.

the downstairs neighbors, marked forever by the google-translated memory of the odd youth who came and went incessantly, but now would never come again? their plants on the fire escape, and the recycling can full of cardboard and glass and plastic that would all be trash, now, along with the rest of my belongings that now belonged to no one. the car, marked by a sun-bleached pair of knitted ornaments and a school-district parking permit and a manhasset music stand in the trunk.

the fairy lights tacked to the wood-paneled walls and ceiling - those would stay forever, if i had to guess. and i have to guess, because this is the night i killed myself. the french horn, of course, played only by a brown bear from ikea, forevermore. a chinese model student instrument. a mouthpiece with a custom rim. a practice mute, rendered useless. who could disturb more totally than this?

i watched the police tell the hospital tell the insurance company tell my emergency contact tell my partner. i'm not sure where it would go from there. who would communicate what to my work, and who would be told how in advance of the final email. who would list out my crucial commitments and dole the news. who would tell my uncle, if he would even react. but i can't care about his opinion, because this is the night-

this is the night. a night just like any other night.

a night for the turtle, swimming in the tank, to climb the vaunted rock and never fear of a human coming close to inspect, to photograph, to wonder. to scoop with spoon and siphon at the evidence that this creature is alive, was there. that the human was responsible.

but that human is not responsible anymore. and the turtle...well, we don't know what he knows.

i would love to write a beautiful poem, about my blossoming death. graceful glints of phrase that hollow out your heart, hold you breathless. i'd love to have lived a beautiful life of genuine and thorough tries. i'd love to die a beautiful experiment, just as full of flesh. but the things i will know, this night, i will not be able to transmit back.

for every insipid conversation about what's new (not much) and how i am (not very), there is a thousandth fragment of what i see, this night, beyond a shatteringly thin and devastatingly thicker pane than ever i've hurled myself against thus far. every distance that was then is multiplied intolerably, now. but i imagine, with my feeble human living brain, that there is pain, that there is consciousness, even on that other side.

why should there be? what would even be the point?

i cannot conceive of a tale to be told about a world without such a suffering.

these poems, these beautiful arched and elegant things about leaves in yards and people being real, do not reflect my reality. of course, i'm not sure they really reflect anyone's reality, written as they are to reflect the worlds viewed through a lens of direct loss; the camera, fading fast, fighting to cut on.

i hate to be cynical. you either kill yourself out of cynicism or torture, though, right?

the stinking trash full of blood (for the mundane reason, the blessed mundane) growing fruit flies continues no matter how inaccessible and heartbreakingly romantic the unattainable become and sustain.

all that i cannot control, that should not torment me, and yet does.

if i could leave things behind, i wouldn't be here. that is to say, i would. if i wasn't afraid, i would be in a much different place. my own driveway would be much more familiar to me.

i'm not sure my reality is really the same as all the other realities. as the most of them. as what it's supposed to be.

the night i killed myself, i had nothing to add, because i'd been going on adding nothing for quite some time.

so i went back the next morning and forgot about it. can't do it right? tragic? don't do it at all.