i'm ALIIIIIVEEE

and most importantly, i have been alive. and writing. here's a strange, distant memory:

before my hair turned dark. before black tee shirts and baggy jeans. before catcher in the rye. before middle school.

before i hit the depressing hilarity of puberty, i thought a lot about myself dying. dying in some self-induced accident. sure, technically, i was thinking of suicide, but i never said the word. i never said it aloud in my head.

like any kid growing out of childhood, death was becoming a very very real possibility and i obsessed over it constantly. i waited patiently for the phone to ring and tell me that my mom was killed in a car accident. getting called to the front office to be informed my dad passed away. and it became steadily more prevalent. i thought about it when laughing at mystery science theater 3000 episodes. i thought about it while peeing. i thought about it while feeding the dogs and chickens. while reading my mom's cosmo. while pulling textbooks out of my desk.

my tiny eleven year old body, which still voluntarily chose to wear floral leotards to school, had come up with a new game. how long could i go without thinking about dying? it felt a lot like that absurd dare to not think about breathing. as soon as you thought about breathing, it seemed impossible to make it involuntary again.

i considered myself "curious" when i decided i would die voluntarily. i had an almost full container of perfume my parents gave me the christmas before. not particularly my favorite scent, i would still occasionally spray it on my barbies anyhow. and i decided to drink it, poison myself and see. thinking back on it, i'm not sure if i meant to "look down at my lifeless body being shaken and cried over" as a ghost (i was a child!) or just rid myself of the constantly overwhelming thoughts of dying. certainly, it was much much different than the thoughts of suicide i collected during my teen years and probably much different thoughts of suicide than that which plagues actual adults. maybe every suicide thought is distinct from each other.

obviously, i didn't go through with it. i don't know why. i think i had a coin toss in my head to choose my fate. i was a very silly child with very trivial ways of thinking about heavyweight subjects. and as an adult, i have tendencies to act the same way. only, i leave dying thoughts alone. i never turn over that stone. i never know if i can trust myself to think about it again. occasionally, when around my friends, when i feel safe and immortal, i allow myself to think about dying.

and it is therapeutic to think about it in a healthy way. i'm working up to the point where i can conjure up emotions and words about dying and not push it around, quickly changing my mind's thoughts. the older i get, the smaller of a threat death becomes, however counterintuitive it seems.

anyway, my perfume poison memory is something i think about on new year's eve. strange and distant.