Nasty Conjugation

I’ve been feeling a little bit overwhelmed by things lately. All of these big adult choices have been weighing heavily on me, and I’ve been prone to periods of late-night introspection. I decided it would be good to put my thoughts down and clear my head a little. Tonight I decided to write about Suzy. I’m posting it here to get my feelings out in the open, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they need to read it. It’s pretty long and personal and not very happy, but here it is. I haven’t really proofread it, so please excuse any mistakes. If anyone can correct or add to my details I would really appreciate it.

That’s exactly what she did. She always made these bullshit little posts that could mean nothing or might mean something pretty awful. They were calculated, short and mysterious, just enough to make you wonder if something was wrong but not provide any real evidence. Most of them could have been lines lifted from a Jets to Brazil song or something. It pisses me off to catch myself doing the same thing now.

I guess that’s the lure of the Internet. You can wrap yourself in as many layers of mystery as you want. You can spin yourself as beautiful or tragic, cheerful or deep, male or female, anything you want. She wanted to be unknowable, which is somehow different than just being unknown. If she never turned on her computer, never registered an online diary, never opened it to the public, well, then she would have been unknown. She wanted to be visible, though. She wanted people to see just enough to become intrigued but not enough to be disgusted. She needed a stage so she could stand with her back to the audience and a curtain to drop between acts. I don’t think anyone really expected her to do anything after so much posturing.

I guess I’ve just got some stuff to get off my chest.

I play her game, too. It’s not the same one she was playing, of course, but it’s played on the same field. I like to be the mysterious loner, the eccentric, introspective outsider. It’s an archetype that appeals to me, and so I often default to it when expressing myself. The thing about that, though, is that I rarely just come out and say what I’m feeling. I hide it in imagery or stories or by stealing song lyrics for away messages, but I don’t actually write about it. This is my attempt at writing frankly about some of the stuff that is frequently on my mind. I want to clean out my system a little.

The girl I’ve alluded to so far is Suzy, a friend of mine from college. She killed herself on March 23, 2003 by ingesting potassium cyanide. I haven’t talked about her much to anyone. I’ve told some people, explained the circumstances of her death to a few, but for something that continues to occupy my mind so often I feel that I have been too silent. I’ve only written about her once, and that was a year after she died. I’m already starting to forget things, so I need to get this out before it’s gone.

I still visit her old Diaryland journal every once in a while, though I fully understand she’s finished updating. Her journal’s title is, “Make Me Pretty,” which was one of her things, always insisting she was ugly. She wasn’t ugly, of course, but she couldn’t see past her own fragile self-esteem. That title is a great example of how she hid in plain sight, expressing her deep emotional issues with non sequiturs on an Internet diary. Reading her journal in retrospect always provides a list of hints and clues that she left behind. Could I have saved her if I had paid more attention? I can’t help but ask myself stupid questions like that. I know she didn’t want to be saved. But could I have? Should I have?

She went through a lot of effort to kill herself. Her decision wasn’t made in a night, or a day, or even a month. She had been planning it for months beforehand. She had help, too, from an Internet group named Suicide Holiday. They called themselves Ashers and posted on a Google group with encouragement for people who wanted to kill themselves. Suzy had been active in this group for some time. She spoke frequently to one member named John. I can remember standing in Suzy’s room, talking to her while she chatted online. I didn’t recognize the screenname she was talking to and asked who it was. Someone named John, she had said. I didn’t know him. This had to be months before she died, since she moved out of our house in March.

Now, you can’t just buy a frosty pint of potassium cyanide. John and the other Ashers taught Suzy how to pose as a jeweler online and order the ingredients necessary to make it herself. Her good friend John even went so far as to talk to her on the phone at the Red Roof Inn where she did it. They knew so much more than us, but we were physically in the same town - the same room! So who’s responsible? Her friends, who should have saved her? The Ashers, who gave her the tools to die?

Of course, we didn’t know all of this at first. The first I heard of it was when Suzy’s boyfriend Mike woke me up at eight in the morning, calling to say he couldn’t get a hold of her. I told him that I didn’t know where she was. I hadn’t talked to her for almost a week. Shortly afterwards he called to say that she had killed herself. Do you know what I did?
I hung up and went back to sleep.

I still feel like such a bastard for it, but there you go. My reaction to being told that my friend, whom I had lived with until just a month prior, had just killed herself was to roll over and go back to sleep. I said I wanted to relate my real feelings on something, and I’m getting to that. I just wanted to make a note as we pass by this moment: to this day I still feel bad about it.

I woke up later that morning and e-mailed all of my professors to say I wouldn’t be in class. I talked to people, online and on the phone, and started to find out what had happened. She had done it in the middle of the night at the Red Roof Inn near the highway. Time-activated e-mails were sent to her parents and to the police so they would know what had happened. I spent most of the day in my room on the Internet or on the phone. Around dusk I sat on our porch swing and talked on the phone more. There was a green mantis on the armrest that sat complacently as the chair swung.

I slept a lot for the next couple days. One or two days later someone, probably Mike, called and asked if I wanted to come over to his place. They had Suzy’s computer. We learned all about Suicide Holiday when we went through her e-mails looking for clues about why she’d done it. Here’s what she wrote on March 21st, two days before she died (and my birthday):

Today, I feel great. Besides feeling a bit lightheaded, I feel good. The sun is shining, the air is warm. It feels like such a nice day to just lie in the sun. To quote Richie Tenenbaum, “I am going to kill myself tomorrow.”

!
Suzy
P.S. I am at work, the keyboard here functions well.

Suddenly everything about her death seemed more sinister. This wasn’t a night of depression that led to a bad decision. People knew she was going to die, and people encouraged it. Reading through the posts on alt.suicide.holiday was awful, draining work. I sat on the floor of Mike’s apartment, leaning back against his bed, and watched Suzy’s cats play while we read her last words. After a while we couldn’t read anymore, so we sat on the front porch and talked. I’d never smoked a cigarette before, but I took the Marlboro Red that Mike offered me and choked through it.

There were four of us, I think. I hate that I can’t even remember for certain, but I remember that it was Mike, Laura, Desiree, and myself. We promised that we’d keep in touch and help each other through things, which we did for a little while. I visited Mike when I was in New York City the next year, and I talked to Laura and Desiree online, but eventually the relationships faded. I feel bad about that, too, even though I know it’s completely natural. What relationship did we have? Aside from the loss of our mutual friend we had moved on. Still, I wonder if I didn’t push them away for fear of having the looming specter of Suzy’s death constantly present in my mind. I truly hope I didn’t.

So what about now? It’s been four years since Suzy died. The house we lived in is for sale, as is the house next door where our elderly landlord lived. It makes me think maybe he’s dead now, too. I hardly talk to anyone who knew Suzy, now, and I hardly talk about her to people who didn’t. The problem is that I still think about her all the time. Every time one of my friends is depressed or someone makes a joke about suicide, it takes me to her. I get scared every time, too, even though I know it’s irrational.

I couldn’t listen to the band Pavement for a long time after she died. I couldn’t listen to Kara’s Flowers or the Pixies, either. Even Reel Big Fish was difficult to sit through. Every time I pass a Red Roof Inn I think about what it would be like to die there, in a hotel room just like every other hotel room, with some tasteless art print on the wall and white towels in the bathroom. Every March 23rd I get a little uncomfortable.

The thing is this, though: last year I didn’t remember. March 23rd of last year was my first day in Japan with Holly. If any one moment could define an enormous step forward in my personal history I think setting foot in Japan might be it. I don’t want to read too much into it. Of course my mind was occupied with other things that pushed Suzy’s death from my mind, but it doesn’t take any stretching to see that I have moved on since then. I have grown and explored and become a new, or at least an updated, person. I found love, lived in Japan, and came back with flush with new experience.

I still think about Suzy all the time. Even though I forgot last year, this year I did remember her death. Is it a step back? I don’t know. I still remember the time I got mad and broke my pencil box on my face in Kindergarten, too. Maybe that’s wrong, too – it certainly is a little strange. Suzy made a decision. She wanted to die, and she followed through with it. It is absolutely terrible that somebody would feel a need to do what she did, and almost unbearably shocking that people would help her, but the fact remains that she made a choice. Her choice hurt a lot of people, and I’m sure it will continue to affect me for years to come. Writing about it helps, though. I miss her. I hope she’s happy.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 1:42 am and is filed under Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.