A Place Without Pain

Prologue

How easy it would be to step forth, let go, and shatter their idyll. To come crashing down to earth, right there in the middle of them all. To bring an abrupt end to the hustle and bustle, to dash my brains out on the pavement and ruin their day. This is my latest fantasy: taking my own life. I peer out the large bay window in the living-room of my sixth-floor apartment and imagine climbing out onto the sill; standing there, savouring the moment, taking flight and landing, face first, onto the concrete below.

It would be violent and shocking, a spectacle not to be missed.

Those unfortunate enough to be in the blast radius would be picking bits of me out of their hair for days. The bystanders and onlookers would merely be traumatised, require counselling, a few days off work. My name would be enshrined in history. I would go down in folklore: the guy who went splat outside the Milky Moo milkshake shop on a balmy Tuesday in June.

That’s why I’ll never do it. I couldn’t bear the fuss. I do want to die, though. I want this to end. I haven’t tried to kill myself yet, but it’s all I think about. It’s my obsession and, ironically, the only thing keeping me going. There are a couple of problems though.

Problem number one: the methodology. I don’t know how to go about it. It sounds simple: take a scissors to your wrists, jump off a building, neck a load of pills; pain and suffering over. What if I mess it up, though? What if I don’t cut deep enough, or cut too deep? What if I smash my body to pieces but somehow survive the hundred-foot drop to the ground, or swallow enough pills to turn my insides to mush but not enough to switch the lights out?

If I get it wrong I might not get another go; life in a wheelchair or a hospital bed the reward for my haplessness. And if I fail, people will know what I’ve done. I’ll be the suicide guy. Aidan Collins, your man who jumped out the window and broke nine vertebrae in his back, half his pelvis and four of his toes, and now can’t go to the toilet unaided. That eejit. A failure at life, a failure at death.

I have failed in life, of that there can be no dispute. I am thirty years old, unemployed and single. I have no qualifications and no skills. I excel at nothing. I have no friends, no social life and no hobbies to speak of. I am overweight, with bad skin and worse hair. I’ve never had sex. I suffer panic attacks every time I go outside, do nothing but watch television from morning till night, and my cat left me to live with one of the neighbours. I’m also an alcoholic.

Someone like me can’t be trusted with their own death. Not that it matters, because I’m too scared to do it anyway.

Problem number two: the thought of inflicting harm upon myself terrifies me. I don’t like pain. So I’m left in limbo, too unhappy to live, too cowardly to do anything about it. The whole thing just gives me a headache, not one bad enough to kill me - more’s the pity - but one which makes me understand why most people don’t bother with suicide, no matter how unhappy they are.

If I were to do it, if I were less scared and I had to choose a method, I’d choose drowning. It’s not overly violent and I could do it away from prying eyes. They’d have no way of knowing whether it was an accident or not, whether I’d been out for a late-night swim and lost my bearings, or willingly allowed myself to be submerged by water until I could no longer breathe. There’d be no collateral damage, either. It’d probably be a hardy fisherman or a lone dog-walker who would discover me, rather than a child or some sensitive sort. It would still physically hurt, of that I have no doubt, but there’d be great peace of mind with it too, the knowledge that I’d be sinking to the bottom where I belong, my lungs slowly filling with water as I suffocate to death.

If I fulfilled my task successfully people would think it was suicide, whisper it among themselves, note how I was ‘always a morose sort’, how depression ‘ran in the family’, but they’d never come out and say it. They would never say, ‘Oh yeah, Aidan Collins killed himself, jumped in the Suir one night and washed up a couple of days later.’ Instead there’d be a question mark hanging over me, an air of mystery: did he or didn’t he?

It makes me think I shouldn’t do it locally. A beach - I’d like to do it at a beach; to be more precise, I’d like to do it in the sea. I’d like to just walk into the sea and keep walking and walking until my feet no longer touched the ground, until I was surrounded by water and sky, until I slowly went under, to the seabed, my deathbed. If I do it at the beach, it would be obvious I’d gone in on purpose.

No one falls into the sea, unless it’s from a boat. They’d know. However, if I put on a pair of swimming togs I could swing the odds back towards accidental death and have them guessing again, retrieving that air of mystery I lost when I started wading into the water. I plan on having a good few drinks beforehand, though, and who goes swimming at night in their togs after drinking a couple of litres of vodka? That would all come up in the coroner’s report: ‘his blood levels showed high toxicity of alcohol’.

There’s so much to consider.