On Living
Today, over fifty-thousand suicides attempts will be made, and about two thousand of them will succeed.
It is not easy, to rend the heart from flesh. Fifty-thousand try--how many more must dream, but do nothing more? It is thousands upon thousands of souls with murder in their hearts. It is an entire nation of darkness, a genocide of self.
Every night, in the muted quiet of my room, I log onto a hotline platform and try with trembling hands to mend the world of broken hearts. I will never know the full extent of my work--it is in the nature of the job, this uncertainty--and so I wonder, and wonder often, if those I try to love will join those two-thousand men and women gone, wonder if their souls, too, have withered into night like vapors.
But suicidal people are the strongest people in the world. For who can bear to wrestle death, to dance daily with thoughts of intimate oblivion, to wage, in the solitude of the soul, war for lost hope, emerging victorious with neither end nor rest?
No, suicidal people have the strongest faith in life there is. For they must live for a life that is hopeless, with not the false faith that life will come, that life will be brighter, but with the faith that life, for all its darkness, is something to be cherished. And no matter how hoarse the demons scream to slit their throats and feel the warm black sputter, to breathe deep the helial plastic sleep and face eternal night, they will choose to live with mad insistence that death is still the enemy and that man, for all his broken horror, is a thing of beauty. They are souls of the spirit. They are insane.
But I am a believer in the insane. A zealot of the soul, with the belief that man is broken but made good because he wants what is good. That rape and murder, for all their lustful carnality, cannot stand against a loving father, and that the insufferable slime of evil, no matter how black and smelly and full of scathing, toxic hate, must bow before the holy seed of hope sown within us all, if we would only let it. That there is divinity--that a dead man might rise, that our lives might have purpose. That a young girl might wake up in bed one day and find that life is worth the living after all.
It is not easy, to rend the heart from flesh. Fifty-thousand try--how many more must dream, but do nothing more? It is thousands upon thousands of souls with murder in their hearts. It is an entire nation of darkness, a genocide of self.
Every night, in the muted quiet of my room, I log onto a hotline platform and try with trembling hands to mend the world of broken hearts. I will never know the full extent of my work--it is in the nature of the job, this uncertainty--and so I wonder, and wonder often, if those I try to love will join those two-thousand men and women gone, wonder if their souls, too, have withered into night like vapors.
But suicidal people are the strongest people in the world. For who can bear to wrestle death, to dance daily with thoughts of intimate oblivion, to wage, in the solitude of the soul, war for lost hope, emerging victorious with neither end nor rest?
No, suicidal people have the strongest faith in life there is. For they must live for a life that is hopeless, with not the false faith that life will come, that life will be brighter, but with the faith that life, for all its darkness, is something to be cherished. And no matter how hoarse the demons scream to slit their throats and feel the warm black sputter, to breathe deep the helial plastic sleep and face eternal night, they will choose to live with mad insistence that death is still the enemy and that man, for all his broken horror, is a thing of beauty. They are souls of the spirit. They are insane.
But I am a believer in the insane. A zealot of the soul, with the belief that man is broken but made good because he wants what is good. That rape and murder, for all their lustful carnality, cannot stand against a loving father, and that the insufferable slime of evil, no matter how black and smelly and full of scathing, toxic hate, must bow before the holy seed of hope sown within us all, if we would only let it. That there is divinity--that a dead man might rise, that our lives might have purpose. That a young girl might wake up in bed one day and find that life is worth the living after all.
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