Fog
Trigger warning: Mention of suicidal ideations.
If you were to ask me what my greatest failure in life is, it would be when I failed to kill myself.
On that day, after class in Grade 11, under the sweltering heat, I wanted to kill myself.
It was a fact I’ve always known, a thought stuck in the corner of my mind. Like that one fishbone—not stuck in your throat but between your teeth. It just sits snug there until you begin to talk, your mouth spewing the words, and the fishbone will just stick deeper in your teeth until you feel the sharp ends through your gum. Try to move it with your tongue, but it would just dig itself deeper until you tasted iron, and oh, my mouth’s bleeding, and it’s really painful. The pain of sorts that made you wish you had never eaten fish in the first place.
That’s how my suicidal ideations felt—a stupid thought that rambled like a thread you pulled from your favorite shirt. It ruins people. It ruined me enough that I almost jumped off a bridge.
I did wish I had succeeded, though. I was already standing in front of the bridge. I could see the murky waters below me. I didn’t even have enough energy to feel disgusted about the foul smell from the river.
I considered jumping into a huge body of such abomination because my head had this fog, and it embraced me. It’s the feeling of being covered completely by blankets or slowly waking up on weekends. It’s the feeling of contentedly reading my favorite book. This fog is a familiar feeling, knowing me enough that it cups the tears in my eyes, pushes the knees I do not feel to head in a direction I wasn’t aware of. This fog—this suicidal ideation—is what made me, me in that moment.
I have a backpack that I have had since Grade 8. I can’t use it anymore because I destroyed the zippers, but I remember it being with me on the bridge. I begged my mother to buy me this backpack because it’s in my favorite color, violet, like Barney.
That backpack felt heavy that time, because it contained my portfolios for my math and science subjects, containing nothing but a compilation of my failed exams. The straps dug into my shoulders, but the pain didn’t register. The fog didn’t allow it.
I was tired that day, yet I kept moving forward, step after step, pain after pain, until we stopped in the middle of a bridge. I was 20 meters high up and I could have jumped. I should have jumped.
Why do I want to kill myself? Why is this even a problem in the first place?
I believe in God, which is why it hurts me the most when I’m told I will go to hell if I kill myself. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t gone through it. But I have thought about God and death countless times. It’s funny how the church doesn’t want you to commit suicide, but they’ll keep praising the afterlife— it’s a true paradise of peace and contentment.
Which is why when I turn to God, I ask him, When will you take me away? Such desperation manifests in me whenever the fog visits, whenever I feel like dying. My faith in him stems from the fact that if he can give me life, then he can take it away without me going to hell.
I tried cutting myself once. I bought a cardboard cutter, which was pink, and I remembered using it to carve illustration boards for our arts class. Later that night, I tried carving the veins out of my wrists. I tried talking to my parents about my suicidal ideation, but I backed out. I wanted to be seen and be reassured, but these are my parents who essentially made sure I survived.
I thought it was cruel to have a child that was very ungrateful and wanted to end instead of nurturing it. So I just kept the thoughts in my head.
This thought was like a seed that I watered daily with my tears, basked in my anger, then placed beside my barely existent dreams. But the seed sprouted in the shape of that fog, and there I was holding the cutter, trying to cut my skin but failing miserably because I have low pain tolerance. I only stopped because my parents knocked, and I felt so ashamed. I’m just glad my wrists didn’t scar. I’m glad nothing scarred.
I don’t know how I will face my parents with that knowledge, which is maybe why the fact that I tried to kill myself remains my biggest failure. There are many things in me that I will never understand and, unfortunately, will never be able to kick, the fog being one of them.
Whenever I feel the urge and the shame, I try to remember why I didn’t jump.
The urge to kill yourself will never go away, because the fact that you’ve tried will mark you. It is only up to us whether we will listen to that fog that keeps egging us. It wouldn’t leave, but I wasn’t expecting it to. But it will leave. Someday. Everyone leaves someday.
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Elaiza Bartolome, 18, is a creative writing student.
