I have finally hit bottom, moment of truth redux

I am going to start out by saying this happened a while (2 years) ago. It may be hard to read, I apologize in advance if it upsets or hurts anyone. I've moved on from the place in this piece and am doing better.

It was a very cold night, the thermometer was registering 15 degrees outside. My soul felt as cold as it was outside, I cannot stand it anymore. I cannot stand living in my skin. I hate this new med cocktail, and the side affects, the sleeping 16 hours a day, the grogginess, the nausea, the stupor and the fog on my brain.

It's another New Year, but what do I have to look forward to? Nothing, nothing. I cannot breathe. Years ago, I would go to the train station and trainspot, until the feeling passed. Now I am home too anxious to get in the car and go somewhere, anywhere til this feeling passes.

Or maybe I don't want it to pass. Maybe in my own warped brain, I want to hold on to it, to embrace it with every fibre of my being. I'm in serious psychic pain, what got me out of bed in my twenties is no longer working and I am living with these broken dreams, cutting my hands daily on them. I'm tired of the bleeding. I'm tired of living without a raison d'etre, without hope. I'm not living anymore, it's all automatic body functions. I cannot deal with it anymore.

I'm bored by TV, and too anxious to watch it. I wander into the kitchen for a glass of ice tea, and see the meds. I had just gotten all the meds renewed earlier that day at

CVS, something I found degrading. My hands shake so I cannot sign my name when I pick them up, or write out a check. I am lucky, there is a female pharmacist who sympathizes with me, and signs for me, with my permission, and takes the blank check, fills it out for me, and records the fee in the checkbook.

Now all the meds are staring me in the face....and maybe in a moment of weakness, maybe in a moment where it's "I don't give a fuck anymore", I go over to them, with my glass of ice tea, unscrew the top to one of them, lay them out on the kitchen table. 100 pills. That should be enough. The cat lies slumbering on my bed, snoring softly. My mother had just washed the comforter when I was hospitalized, and it smells linen fresh and clean. I love my bed, it's my own bed (with a different mattress) from my childhood, and it comforts me. My marital bed on the other hand, was too big to maintain, and has a lot of bad memories. I was glad to see it go.

Two pills down the hatch. I am optimistic, this doesn't seem to be so bad, I am looking forward to swallowing them all and lying down on the bed and just going to sleep. I choke on the third, it won't go down, but eventually it does. Four, five and six....when I get to seven the cat is rubbing up against my leg. I stop to pick her up, and she goes into purr overload. Then she bites my hand and runs over to the computer, daring me to get on it.

She puts her body on it, the screensaver wakes up and she hits a favorite button with her right paw. My first favorite is Google, the second and third favorite are the websites of my two of my several muses. One of them pops up, and I see it's been updated. So I read. I sit down and read.

And read and read.

Now let me explain about these two wonderful people in my life who are my muses One I know in real life, the other I have never met. Both people have encouraged me to write and believe in me not only as a writer, but a human being, and these are the two people have really motivated and challenged me to write again, when I have given it up as a broken dream. I've only had two other living muses, my first creative writing professor, and J.D. Salinger.

So, It was serendipitous that I stumbled across this little bit of writing written years ago and for some reason came up in a bookmark made long ago and forgotten.

Sometimes when you are that blue, that suicidal, you just need something, anything to get you out of the moment to help you get out of yourself til the feeling passed. And that was the gift this person gave to me with their gift of writing. They didn't know it, and I have never told them this. That one miserable cold horrible night, I read and read and read until the feeling passed and kept reading until the sun came up, and yes, I was still depressed, and yes, I still wished I was dead, but the feeling was passive, not active, and they may have saved my life.