Exit Strategy

No subtitle

I haven’t published anything in months

I don’t have writer’s block.

I haven’t been staring at a blank page waiting for inspiration.

I haven’t been researching.

I haven’t been carefully crafting my next essay.

The truth is I’ve barely been surviving.

In a drawer beside my bed there is a small bottle. In that bottle there’s a liquid that i won’t name but let’s just say 2.5ml is a good time but 3ml is goodnight forever.

Not because I’m reckless.

Not because I’m dramatic.

It’s there because at some point over the last year I became so exhausted by grief that the mere existence of an emergency exit felt comforting.

Read that again.

Not using it.

Not planning it.

The fact that it exists.

That’s where I have been.

People imagine despair as something loud. They picture sobbing. Breakdown. Crisis.

In my experience despair is administrative.

You wake up.

You pay bills.

You answer messages.

You buy groceries.

You tell people you’re fine.

Then at three in the morning you lie in bed staring into the dark and realise the thing bringing you the most peace is knowing that if it ever became completely unbearable, there is a way out.

That thought should’ve terrified

me.

That’s the part I don’t think people understand.

I don’t want to die.

I want the pain to stop.

I want the endless replay of memories to stop.

I want the loneliness to stop.

I want the grief to stop growing every time I think I’ve reached the bottom of it.

I want to stop carrying a marriage around like a ghost that refuses to accept it is dead.

And when your world becomes small enough, dark enough and quiet enough, the distinction between wanting to die and wanting the pain to stop becomes harder to explain to people who have never stood in that particular corner of hell.

So no, I haven’t been writing.

I’ve been occupied.

Trying to convince myself that tomorrow remains a worthwhile investment.

Trying to remember that loneliness is not the same thing as truth.

Trying to survive the distance between the life I thought I was building and the life I actually have.

The bottle is still in the drawer.

I’m still here.

At the moment, that will have to be enough.