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2002-04-14 - 4:15 a.m. Yes I have thought about it, at times. In fact, as early as last week. In the play ‘Night Mother’ Jessie tells her mother: "Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus and it's hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy and more than anything in the world you want to get off and the only reason in the world you don't get off is it's still fifty blocks from where you're going? Well, I can get off right now if I want to, because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it's the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. As soon as I've had enough it's my stop. I've had enough." In Kiarostami’s movie ‘The Taste of Cherry’, Mr Bada’ai tells the Afghan cleric that if a word appears in the dictionary, it must have its application in real life. They were both talking about suicide. The Latin prefix sui, meaning "of oneself," and placed before the Latin verb caedere, meaning "to kill." An adjustment of conjugation rendered the word suicidium, and in the company of previously-existing French words (homicide, matricide, patricide, fratricide), it became the word we know today -- a product of Anglo-Franco faux Latin. The first known use of the word is in Walter Charleton's The Ephesian and Cimmerian Matrons, written in 1651: "To vindicate ones self from... inevitable Calamity, by Sui-cide is not... a Crime." It is interesting how its first known usage is an apologia for the act. The idea of suicide is an idea of limits. Like Jessie says, ‘I’ve had enough.’ She has reached her limit, and perhaps everywhere she goes she sees a door, forbidding, but with a ghostly ‘EXIT’ sign above it. It is locked. But she knows that everyone is born with the key, hidden in the deepest recesses, beyond the borders of the body, beyond the checkpoints of the soul, the sentries of morality or religion. She will travel deep to the interior to retrieve it. She notices the path is full of footprints, some suddenly performing U-turns and disappearing in the opposite direction. She takes it one step at a time. In the beginning she saw death as the temptation. She will persevere, until the skies turn black and starless and it is absolute and infinite night. This is the point where life becomes the temptation, life with its single plea: hope, hope, hope. ********************************************************************* I ran out of the house with a book in my hands, called ‘Becoming a Man’. An ironic title, because my only wish at that time was to stop being one, to cease to exist. I slammed the door, the voice of my mother trailing behind me, still aggrieved, still stinging. I was crying, and indignantly I wiped my tears with the sleeves of my T-shirt. I ran down the stairs, and walked furiously, across the car park, across the field where the grass was threadbare and moonlit, under the MRT flyover running between Simei and Tampines, and all the time I refused to look up at the sky as I feared that an answer would be emblazoned across it. I kept on looking forward, refusing to entertain all other thoughts, and I pinned my mind on the certainty of statistics: death by jumping from a height had a higher success rate (success rate!) than that by wrist-slashing, or poison, or drowning. Around me I saw the fluorescent-lit void decks, how poor the light was, how it was as if someone had calibrated it to the precise luxmeter reading, where light is only the illusion of light, light which is simply a bright shadow. The void decks were desolate, and each one was a metaphor for absence, this useless and temporary space, the graffiti on the speckled stone tables a collection of untidy epitaphs. I was in good company. The walkway under the block—I walked across it like someone shopping for a cemetery plot, suicide was really about free will, ultimately, not just when or how you’ll die, but also where. And I felt a touch of guilt at walking down someone else’s corridor, across children’s bicycles and soccer shoes, past potted plants whose needs were infinitely simpler than mine: a pot of earth, sunlight, water, air…what rudeness to launch myself into the beyond in front of someone else’s house, perhaps already sleeping or reading a book or looking forward to tomorrow, but no, I had left behind me a wake which started from my own house, one could trace an umbilical string from that slammed door to my eventual point of exit, my act would be a matter of simply snipping that string off; gravity would settle everything else for me. No, I could not leave the world from the absurd location of my 2nd-floor dwelling, but yes, my point of departure was not from a ledge 6 blocks away from my own home, but home itself. What happened next? 6 AM, many, many hours after I first stepped out, I was in the bathroom. I had just witnessed my own father sobbing after many, many years. I could not face him so I hid my face in my T-shirt as he escorted me home. I had spent most of the night in the playground (without my spectacles, the stars were smudges of light), and I was washing sand off my scalp, the back of my neck and ears, my thighs and calves. I didn’t soap—all I wanted was the warm water rushing down my body; water as blanket, water as womb. I closed my eyes and cupped my hands over my ears. I could hear each water-drop now, amplified. Blake wanted to see the world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour. Maybe he did. How simple it would be if someone were to open the toilet door and find the water still running, and only the water, the steam on the mirror--the person had vanished. So strong was his will for oblivion that he had followed the sound of rain in his inner ear to that shaded place just behind the waterfall where it is still, where it will forever be still. Dawn was breathing mists of light onto the windows. There, naked as the day I was born, in the dark of perpetual rain, I had never before felt so close to my death.
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