Fred Aiken Writing

the note I wrote in the fifth grade was a suicide letter

to my future self,

and of course I don’t want to make my past self

a liar,

so I made plans to kill myself.

though if I’m being honest,

I never knew how involved it would be to just die.

I had to explain it to my girlfriend,

my parents,

my sister,

and of course they all had the same sort of questions and comments,

busy-bodying themselves with why I would take a note

written so long ago,

and plan out my death around it.

at least, though,

my past self didn’t specify exactly how I needed to die,

so there was some leverage in deciding

how I wanted to go about it,

because I am an adult, 

and so I must know how I wanted to die,

but I didn’t.

there were so many different ways to go about doing it,

all of which sounded fairly painful,

none of which I wanted to go through with,

so I took some weeks to figure it out,

researched my options,
probably ended up on a government list of some  sort for

all the weird crap I looked up on the internet,

though by the time they got around to questioning me,

I imagine I’d already be dead,

or close to it.

in the end, I chose pills,

an antipsychotic,

that would just drift me off to another plane of existence,

or non-existence,

or non-non-existence,

barreling through a fix state,

from motion to,

stop,

closer to a place that my fifth grade self would enjoy,

or at least I hope so.

pallets upon pallets 

stacked across the horizon,

each bearing a load that has no name,

each hoping to be shipped to a lovely house

at the end of the cul-de-sac,

where a Victorian stucco house sits

atop a hill with no one at home,

to be delivered another day,

still no one answers,

to be delivered another day,

pastel streams of jet fuel floating over the sky,

harkening in a new age 

of next day,

another day,

delivery,

but no one is home,

to be delivered, yet again, another day