Strangely, Hopeful

3.49 years. 41 months. 182 weeks. 1,274 days. 20,576 hours. 1,834,560 minutes. 110,073,600 seconds. What if I told you these moments were borrowed - that this time wasn’t promised, but earned? Would you understand what it took to get me here? Would you spend a moment with me?

Almost three and a half years ago I was dying, and not metaphorically. I was literally staring into the eyes of the end of my own life; down the barrel of the slowest gun I could find, death by bong tokes… not exactly the romantic overdose I imagined. I was leaving with all my dreams unfulfilled. All my future love left ungiven. All my promises to myself unkept. It’s not that I didn’t want to live - at least part of me didn’t mean it when I threatened to take my own life in the past - but this time I really was killing myself. And sadly, not even to prove a point. Starving like only a stoner could, a rack of bones with a stomach half full of junk food, wilting away in the vase that was my cluttered studio apartment.

It wasn’t a miracle that saved me. There was no divine intervention (although the story gets there eventually), not luck, chance, nor fluke. No, it didn’t happen overnight, and I would be lying to claim I did it alone, as many lent their hand only to be snapped at by my frothing, fiending mouth. Still, it took not giving up - that was my end of the bargain.

People say that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, or at least my dad likes to say that anyway. Both of us exasperated, weakened by the trials of the day, month, year, lifetime. Him muttering about horses and me ready to sink my head just deep enough into their trough. People tried to help - I know they really did – but there was nothing they could do or say that would course-correct my destruction. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I was on a mission to feel everything, all at once, all the time. I didn’t hide from my traumas, I flaunted them as my crown of thorns (a fair comparison, wasn’t Jesus also just a starving queer, desperate to share his gifts with the world, to have his father love him?) I digress. I wanted the world to feel like I did - to feel it all with me, to feel everything, all at once, all the time. To what end, or for what?

The day I realized I had hit rock bottom, I met myself in the mirror after a long, scalding-hot shower. Or really, I just met a ghost with my name. I ran my fingers across the sides of his chest, callous-tipped and raw; they vibrated, skipping across the valleys between each rib bone like some haphazardly assembled guitar. With hands trembling, I tenderly touched cheekbones and jaw, bruised and still swollen from self-beatings the week prior. I looked into his eyes, sunken and dark from sleepless nights and endless days of longing - eyes hoping to find something beyond the worth of a tortured artist.

I knelt in front of my junky shrine and packed a heaping bowl with tobacco, waterlogged roaches found from my nightly desperate escapades, and a sprinkle of shrapnel kief scavenged from the last hour of scraping any remains stuck to the inside of my metal grinder. I lit my hemp wick (the healthy alternative to butane lighters) and breathed death through the toxic sludge that was once clear water, my head whipping back with eyes heavy as bliss turned into immediate nauseating regret. Blowing through the crack of my blacked-out, blanket-curtained window, my passion for change exhaled in the shape of a smoggy cloud that spelled the word: stop. I always thought of quitting mid-hit. You see, I knew it was bad - my lungs couldn’t lie any longer. Breath came shallow now, wheezing as I shuffled from shrine to bed, bed to shrine, shrine to bed. Those were the only places it felt safe enough to nest my heart - but the very places that were keeping me alive, were also slowly killing me.

A week after realizing I had hit rock bottom, Mom dropped off some slow-cooked chicken and rice. Which is saying a lot considering my diet consisted entirely of weed smoke and emotional neglect.

By this point, it had been a few days since I had gone to the crisis nurse at the hospital - my parents escorting me like it was my first day of swim club, except this time, tryouts were for the psych ward. No goggles, no fins, just moments of dissociation and the same number of tears while struggling to stay afloat. But the ward was full, jammed with other nut-jobs - no room for one more broken brain. Even as my dad pleaded for some sort of solution, the psych nurse handed me a pamphlet like it was a menu: ‘Today’s special - suicide hotline, served lukewarm.’ I would have laughed if not for how quickly I saw it break him. The fact that he and my mom were there, together after all these years apart, meant something was wrong. They looked at me with too much concern - not like usual - for there not to be something truly wrong.

I took a bite of the meal Mom made, and I felt every molecule shift inside of me as it slid down to hit my empty stomach. It felt like God. Tears welled up. For the first time in forever, I felt nourished – and strangely, hopeful. It wasn’t just food - it was a Michelin-starred intervention.

Two weeks after realizing I had hit rock bottom, hours soared by as I did. I often wandered the streets around my house looking for a glimpse of something beautiful - at the very least, some fresh air and movement for a change. I was moving forward, if only barely. In hindsight, I wish I would have caught my own reflection passing by the store windows, that is, if I really wanted to find something beautiful. Something beginning to grow. The light was blinding, cars thundered like stampedes, thoughts louder still. My senses hadn't quite adjusted to the hustle and bustle of real life. I took breaks, often. I sat against the cold brick outside of shops, drawing sketches in my notebook and noticing the normalcy of everyone’s lives as they passed me by, contemplating how they could live like that. Why weren’t they angry like I was? Was their peace earned - or ignorance? Then I remembered - oh right, they probably weren’t living off smoke, instant noodles, and existential dread.

“Stop thinking that way. Let go.” I murmured to myself as my knuckles rubbed circles into my chest.

I remembered to look for something beautiful. I found it in the cliché of a bundle of flowers growing between the cracks of the sidewalk, and pretentiously, I saw myself in it. I was still so far from being those flowers, but at least, for now, I had noticed it.