An Uncertain Emerald Nothing

Things have to get worse before they can get better, or so you tell yourself as you ascend the stairs, hoping they’ll save you somehow. As if you’ll drop your problems on one of these steps and they’ll just fall down.

You enter your room; it is childlike as it always has been. Why wouldn’t it be? Your parents always half-expect you to come back for weekends. Especially during Labor Day weekend. Lord knows you wouldn’t want to spend three whole free days on that campus.

And of course, you also know that nobody will allow you to spend time there, away from your peaceful, loving home after the shit you pulled.

You feel the anxiety and anguish begin to creep back up your spine and drape over you as you recollect the preceding days, peering at the heavy bandages on your wrists. The days that came just before wash over you, whether you like it or not.

For you had pulled a trick that, to your knowledge, nobody had pulled at all yet. But you had been pondering it for so long, it felt old as time. A morbid experiment done under the guise of playfulness, you used it as a test to see if you had the will to survive, or if any higher power, be it God or anything else, truly wanted you to survive.

The knife in your desk, the one you used to cut packages open--you took it outside and walked several yards away from your dormitory building. Looking around, there was hardly a soul in sight. Peering at the little blue vein sticking out from your left wrist, you drove the tip of the blade into it, and yanked it down. Watching the crimson thickness escape from the vein, you then looked at your right wrist, and did the same action.

From there, you waited for a matter of seconds that felt like minutes. It was not a rescue you were hoping for, but an epiphany, a realization of the sheer stupidity of what you had just done. Thoughts like You fucking idiot and What did you think would happen? were being waited on.

But you were filled with even more dread upon an antithesis of sudden conclusions, that such thoughts were not coming, at least not anytime soon. And you already felt dizzy and disoriented from the stream of blood hitting the gravel ground; so it was time to do the second half of the experiment.

You began walking toward the nurse’s office across the campus, beginning to feel drunk from the blood loss. You pass by a multitude of people, but you pull your long sleeves over your entire arms so as to avoid being noticed. Your eyes flicker back and forth with paranoia; you want what you’ve done to be seen but would also die if not from the blood-loss but from the embarrassment. A mixed concoction of emotions sweep through you; you’re miserable and mortified, but you also feel as though you’ve had a cathartic release in what you’ve done.

Finally you reach the nurse’s office; you walk up the steps, and your fingers brush at the doorknob but you realize then that your hand is too weak to turn it properly. A bit frantic you slam yourself into the door until a disgruntled and confused nurse opens the door and quietly asks: “Um… May I help you?”

And that’s when you raise your long, bloody sleeves and pull one of them down muttering over stumbled words, “I decided I wanted to live…”

But as you paced the corners of your childhood bedroom it was not these facets of memory that shot chills and adrenaline up your spine; for that feeling was accredited to the green light.

Whilst you were laying on the nurse’s table, arms spread with the women of medicine putting pressure on the wounds and trying (seemingly fruitlessly) to sew them up, you kept your eyes on the ceiling. And in this you eventually saw the ceiling come closer, despite not feeling your body rise.

You would try to look around, see what was happening, if something had gone wrong, but your eyes and your head would just stay still as the ceiling-tile dead-center in your vision would come closer and closer.

And, as your being (or soul?) ascended, the accursed tile would fade, in its place a light, as painfully bright as the Sun itself; and it would not be the light that you find frightening. It would be that the light was not a golden yellow, one symbolizing either a kingdom of Heaven or one of those rebirths celebrated in the East. It would not even be a terrifying hellish crimson hue, for this light was an abyss of green, a dark-coated emerald with a light in its center.

But just as you register the shade of the light, you feel yourself fall down in a singular and instantaneous movement, snapping yourself back into your body and waking up. All your psychological anguish and all the pain in your wrists came rushing back in-between bouts of pure adrenaline. You had lived this time, and you had seen what comes next, and it's not comforting, it's just confusing and chaotic.

Even after having spent a night in a ward and convincing a therapist that the move you made was no more than a “misguided lapse of judgement,” you know yourself not only to be unwell but to also be sicker than before. All your duress and stressors had become insignificant in comparison to the fearful void that the green light seemed to represent, and not a single thing you’d ever witnessed in this life here could possibly compare to what you know is waiting for you when your final day comes to pass.

So, as you stalk the hardwood floors of your childhood bedroom, you conclude that you have a couple of options: you could live, and live in fear, of what comes when you disappear into that green light, each and every day as you inch closer to the inevitable; or, you could face it now, in an act of courage and bravery. The kind of an act a man does.

You open your dresser and see your father’s shotgun. When Mom and Dad had taken you back to the house for Labor Day weekend, they scarcely left you alone. But when they did, you made sure to grab this old-fashioned weapon from your father’s shed, knowing he rarely used it.

Anxiety and panic cause you to feel rhythmic heartbeats in not only your chest but in your freshly-wounded wrists. You load the singular shell you’d taken into the weapon and cock it back. Careful not to fire it accidentally, you lean the weapon back into your mouth and look toward the bedroom light, the ceiling-fan whirring indifferently.

Finger on the trigger, an epiphany occurs. You suddenly know, and know for certain that the green light symbolizes not Heaven, not Hell, but suicide itself. The act of taking one’s own life, and it probably amounted to something far more devastating than Hell can promise.

A tear forms in your eye, and trickles down a little, and your gaping mouth smiles a little, as you realize that no matter the nature of the green light, there are glimmers of hope in the life you possess, and the world you still inhabit.

But, whether it be an act of God or a Devil, your subconscious suicidal-self or just the result of a chaotic universe, your finger slips and the shotgun goes off, with the barrel inside your mouth, just as you decide not to go through with this action.

You ascend once again, this time much more rapidly, and, even knowing that what you had done was a clear mistake, you feel what you can only conclude to be your soul being thrust and propelled into an uncertain emerald nothing.