Intihar

The title for this entry means suicide in Turkish, playing around with the notion that people that try to commit suicide are somehow 'chicken'. It is a non-fiction piece.

I tried to kill myself once. I was nearly successful. A weekend of too much drinking and partying, a way of avoiding the caustic truth that once again I had managed to upset the man I loved to the point where he couldn't even be friends with me. Again. All I had done was tell him that my biggest fear was for him to leave me. Silly girl. No one wants to hear that. At least he didn't. He started behaving strangely after that, until eventually communication broke down entirely, and he finished off by telling me he didn't think he could be with me anymore.

 

I remember that evening quite well, considering . It was a Tuesday and I was out, watching a band in the Blues Bar. It was a busy night in there, lots of people dancing and shouting in each other's ears, trying to make themselves heard over the music. I couldn't get into it. I vaguely remember speaking to Matt, his face pale against the dark of the bar as her leant over to make sure I was ok. I think he offered to come crash at my house if I needed some company, not anything sexual, just one friend looking out for another. I said no. I think I had already decided what I was going to do. I remember walking home. It usually only takes 10 minutes, but I was weaving and wobbling along the pavement, crying as I tried to send my lover a text. I finally managed to write what I felt was the perfect thing to say.

 

'This is all your fault.'

 

After all this was over, the thing I regretted most was these five words. What if I had actually managed it? How could I have put the blame for something this awful at someone else's feet?

 

I worked myself up into a frenzy of snot, tears and shaking. I could barely get my keys in the door when I eventually arrived home. I knew that I had a strip of amytriptaline tablets in the cupboard in the kitchen. My flat was a mess, from where I had just dumped coats, bags and shoes over the weekend before heading back towards the madness I was in now. All I knew was that I didn't want to wake up in the morning. I got a glass of water and proceeded to pop out pills onto the worktop. I remember thinking that it was actually quite difficult to swallow loads of pills. You have to do it a few at a time, not all at once. I managed to get down 28 tablets, and went and sat on the sofa. I felt calmer. And then it hit me. What the hell had I done? Shit. I rang my best friend. I had sobered up; I think it must have been the shock of the situation. She eventually answered, and slurring, I told her what I had done. Since that night, I have tried to imagine what it must have felt like to be her. Sure, I'd rung her in the past and needed to go to hospital for self-inflicted cuts and once, a minor overdose, but never anything on this scale. I imagine her waking up, sitting up from the sofa where she'd dozed off watching her favourite show, standing up and hurrying out to the car to come and save me again.

 

By the time she arrived, only 10 minutes later, I had started to feel drowsy. I told her I didn't need to go to hospital, and started to doze off on the sofa, after sweeping all the mess off onto the floor. She jumped on my computer and looked up the side effects of an amytriptaline overdose. She came over to me, and shook me awake. 'Nope. We're off to the hospital.'

 

I staggered out to the car. I gave Anna my keys to lock up; I couldn't keep my eyes open. There was no traffic on the road, and she drove too fast. We arrived after only a couple of minutes. All I remember is getting into the hospital, stumbling into A and E, finding a chair to sleep in. the lights were really bright and I just wanted to shut my eyes.

 

I don't remember very much about the next 36 hours; brief glimpses of green and bright lights. No, not THAT bright light... Although I do remember one brief scene when I woke up because someone was touching me intimately. I remember coming round and trying to fight them off, and having to be held down by my family as the nurse put in a catheter.

 

When I came round, I couldn't move. Not an inch. They'd pumped me full of diazepam to try and slow my heart down. It had been going at nearly 200 beats a minute for hours. I'd been in intensive care, which I only found out after a nurse came to see how I was doing and told me. When the ability to move and speak returned, I demanded they took out the catheter. Awful thing. Makes you feel like you're pissing and pissing nonstop. I wanted a cigarette. I looked out of the window, which was high up the wall, and my mind went blank as I stood up to look. These rooftops weren't the rooftops of Harrogate. It turned out I had been moved to Leeds hospital, but I didn't know that. I thought I'd managed to kill myself, and ended up in purgatory. Not that I'm religious, but it turns out you do think some ridiculous things when you've just woken up from a self-induced coma. Not to mention the ridiculous things you thought that got you there in the first place.

 

A woman from the psychiatric ward came down to talk to me. She took me off to a private room, and asked me the usual questions. I had been asked them so many times before. Why did I do it, did I still want to die? Mostly, I just felt stupid. Like I'd let everyone down.

 

Sometimes, I still think about doing it. Just a flash across my mind if something has got to me or if someone upsets me. Sometimes it's just silly things. Not been able to get an essay finished. Saying something dumb. The thought appears, like the glimpse of a fish in a river, a flash of silver and then gone. I won't be trying again though. The pain and hell I put my family through showed on their faces, and while they said the most loving things to me that day, I knew what I'd done to them. Never again.