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.