In my fantasies, I’m invincible.

You can never have too many thoughts on a long train ride. That’s what I learned on my usual commute to college, when I would take an hour-long train ride with a transfer in between to get to campus five days a week. Usually, I would drown my thoughts with loud pop music some days, indie rock the next, bollywood hits the day after that, and kpop bangers the day after that. On some specific days, my thoughts would be louder than the music and I was free to imagine whatever I wanted. Maybe I was in a sad movie scene looking out the window, or maybe I was rewriting an argument I didn’t win.

On the day that I’m writing about, all I had were thoughts of me dying.

As I looked out the window at the lush greenery, I vividly imagined all of the ways I could die. It wasn’t like this was the first time I had thought of death or even imagined my own ending through multiple routes. There was just something about the trees and small creeks I saw from the train window that made me picture myself sprawled out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in a white flowy dress (the color one usually wore at funerals where I’m from), lying on the ground awake but unmoving for days as the bugs crawled all over me and the overgrown weeds engulfed most of my body. Strangely, I wasn’t dead in this story, or in any of the other scenarios I ever imagined in my head.

I was thinking of death and dying, but I was always alive. I was alive in the woods, and somebody would come see my body sprawled out and scream out of fear. I would then tell them in a nonchalant voice that I was just resting and letting the creatures feast on my body, and that I was fine. When I imagined shooting myself, I never died of a gunshot. I survived it and when my friends and family were teary-eyed in the hospital room, I would just tell them (nonchalantly) that I was just sad and I shot myself five times (more was unrealistic and less didn’t seem like enough) but persevered. I never cut myself; I just recounted the multiple times I slashed myself across the thigh as a punishment for getting an answer to a practice test wrong, and people would see my grief as well as my dedication to bettering myself.

In all of those scenarios, I was impenetrable. I was basically untouched in the way that mattered. I was immortal, even. I was invincible, and all that happened was that other people were now aware my mental state was diminishing.

I think that’s what people want most. During thoughts of suicide, people most often imagine other people’s reactions, and that tells you a lot about what it is that you really want.

The station before my usual stop is beautiful in that there is a large body of water just before you approach that station, which could be seen from either side of the train. One side showed a nice yellow house with an old but standing white picket fence right on the edge of the water, and the other side showed the open water and occasionally, families of ducks. This water body was something I worshipped. Whenever I had the chance to see it, the gentle surface glistening with sunlight calmed me down and I often based my days on whether I would have the chance to see it or not. It was essentially my God, or my tarot card, or my horoscope reading. That day, I desperately wanted to see the water and pray for good things. When I saw the telltale sign, the dip in the road right before its arrival, I closed my eyes tightly and made a wish wholeheartedly, so that when I opened them again after the words came into existence, I would see the glistening surface and be soothed.

I don’t want to die.

As I took a deep breath after uttering that sentence in my head and opened my eyes, I realized that I was still two stops away from that station, and that I didn’t know the path or the telltale sign leading to the water, just like I didn’t know what I wanted. And what I wanted in all my years of dealing with this immense sadness, was to live.