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checkered-midnights · 22 days ago

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(TW: Suicide, slurs, American politics)

a genuine miracle of a read. 5k words and worth every letter.

DELTARUNE TOMORROW

In 1989 Trident Comics published a four-part comic titled St. Swithin’s Day.

St. Swithin’s Day follows an unnamed 19 year old who has decided to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. The comic follows him in the days leading up to the event. He steals, and later decides to throw away, a copy of Catcher in the Rye. He has a conversation with a woman in a cafe who only exists in his head. He sleeps in a maintenance train car. He dances to The La’s “There She Goes” in front of Karl Marx’s grave. He calls his mother, who begs him to come home and interview for a job at a grocery store. The morning of St Swithin’s Day he jumps in front of Margaret Thatcher, appearing as a madman reaching into his jacket pocket, "neurotic boy outsider" written proudly on his forehead. He pulls out nothing. He points his finger at her and simply says “bang” out loud and is promptly tackled by security. He rides home on the train, covered in bruises and less one tooth.

“It was worth it just to see her scared.”

St. Swithin’s Day was written by Grant Morrison, known for the incredibly metatextual first arc of Animal Man, as well as his run of Doom Patrol, The Invisibles, and All-Star Superman. He was part of the all-star lineup behind 52, the comic that got me into comics. It is illustrated by Paul Grist, an artist well-known for the series Kane. At least that’s what Wikipedia is telling me. I did not ever find the time to consume Grists’ other works, let alone study them as closely as I did Morrison’s, before deciding on my method of suicide.

[Recommended reading for this is on my new website, Earth-64. It is also available on Archive of Our Own.]

I tried to kill myself five times in a three year period. You’d say I’m being a bit loose saying I “tried” when I was never found unconscious on the pavement or bleeding out in the bath. Suicide is not a singular moment. It is weeks of spiraling. It is time spent feeling unreal. It is a decision made in a manner of thought existing below consciousness. It is a monster that festers inside of you, begging for the conditions to be met that would allow your conscious mind to accept it. A remaining sliver of your rational brain watches helplessly as you cut yourself off from your support network. You start consuming media that you know will make you sad. You want to get your brain to want to kill you. You want to feel like you want to die. You’re afraid you’ll get better, that you’ll miss your chance. You start writing a note in your head that you’re too afraid to put onto paper. Yet you may write it in a hurried panic late one night, because you need it with urgency. You’re afraid you won’t be able to write it later because you’ll be too far gone. You learn the songs that make you the saddest and assemble the playlist that will kill you. You plan the perfect day of melancholic vitriol that would make it possible and you set a date. I tried to kill myself five distinct times while in Seattle.

I’m hurtling towards the sixth attempt at forty miles per hour on the Sound Transit light rail as the soundtrack to my demise tocks Clark Powell’s “Ephemeral Muse” and ticks over to Will Wood’s “Against the Kitchen Floor”. Othello gives way to Columbia City and the Seattle skyline spells out a threat I know all too well it has the guts to follow through with. I’m thinking about how blind I must have been to think it said anything different to me as I was riding in just four years ago just as Mount Baker swallows the train whole. Will Wood’s apologies for his inability to become human echo through the maintenance tunnels of my brain.

We emerge from the tunnel out into Soho and Seattle is no longer a threat on the horizon but a looming beast. The light rail does not stop. We drive straight into the beast’s stomach as Ada Rook’s “Strangers” takes its turn stabbing me gently. This metal snake worms its way through the beast’s colon and I become aware of the other passengers for the first time as I start to bawl my eyes out. They do not react.

These underground stations are the familiar ones, the ones I would pass every day on my way to work. For the first year I lived in Seattle I took this train from Capitol Hill to the International District and back again. I remember every emotion I’ve ever experienced on this train. I remember how much hope and joy I had once felt. That was supposed to be the start of my Real Life. It wasn’t supposed to be an empty chapter of rot near the end of my book. I hate that I now feel so unwelcome here. I hate that being here now makes me want to die. I hate that I came here to die.

“Now arriving: Capitol Hill.”

I stand on the platform for a moment and take in the segmented planes I’ve passed under hundreds of times. On my first day here I took a selfie with them and made a joke about being with Eva-01. That’s just what happens when you show a daunting hunk of purple and green metal to someone who watched Evangelion for the first time just a few months prior. I wonder how many other people have made the same joke or even had the same fleeting thought for just a few seconds as they ride the escalator. Now I’m reminded more of the stealth bomber obscuring the moon at the end of Psycholonials, but that’s just what happens when you place a suicidal tranny underneath a daunting hunk of metal. It occurs to me for just a moment that I never once bothered to look up what this art piece is actually called or who made it. I don’t stop to do that now. I’m ascending up the escalator fast enough that the onism can’t keep up.

When I emerge I’m met with the heart-wrenching site of a clear blue sky. It’s a rare hot day in Seattle. I avoid a few nagging clipboard-wielders pedaling some kind of phone scam and make my way down Broadway. I should have exited the station from the other end. Old habit.

Each step I take into Cal Anderson feels like turning up the volume dial of a screaming static. The large round fountain is spilling water forth in an endless performance. The lawns are dotted with twenty-somethings smoking weed and throwing frisbees to their dogs. Only a couple kids are hanging from the monkeybars. I never saw many kids in this city. That horrid bright blue sky and roaring hot sun loom above it all. What is left of our natural world if you can’t count on rain in Seattle anymore?

My penchant for what the kids are calling “Aura and Hype” and I call “finding narrative fulfillment” and most would call “cringe” forces me to turn on Mike Oldfield’s “Nuclear” as I take a seat on a park bench.

Standing on the edge of the crater.

I try to imagine the cold ashes that must still lay embedded deep in the dirt. In my mind I see the lawns beaten down to workable soil. A sea of tents set up inside protective walls of chainlink and cardboard. And words, words everywhere. Cries for freedom and for change, mantras painted onto every surface. Endless crowds of people fighting loud and proud for a better world.

And I can’t see it.

I wasn’t there.

What a mess we made, when it all went wrong.

In June of 2020 I found myself back together with my long-distance right-wing ex-boyfriend after he simply refused to let me break up with him. I had quit my job in December 2019, he dropped the ball on moving me in, and I was stuck without a job when the pandemic hit. I tried to dump him as my politics took a miraculously wild turn left, then everything stagnated. The world came to a stop. My parents still wanted money for rent and there was a black void beyond our porch steps. They threatened to throw me out into it on more than one occasion that summer. Getting back together with my ex was the best option I had if I wanted to stay alive. But I did so with a stipulation: I told him that if a revolutionary movement started and led to a commune situation, anywhere on the planet, I would leave him immediately. I would drop everything and run to anywhere in the world to find freedom. Of course he didn’t think it would ever happen.

CHAZ was founded the following weekend.

I watched from afar as all the leftist history I had been reading for the past year played out in real time on my computer screen. I think to most people aware of it at the time it felt like a story of legend. Sparse images made their way online, stories passed around by pure written word promised a narrative that seemed magical, mythical. Even at that moment it was easy to dismiss it as a work of fiction. Five years removed and nothing here remains to prove it wasn’t.

I was uniquely positioned to know people who were there. I spoke to people who had their boots in this very soil. At the time it was a real thing I could see happening to people I cared about, and now I still see its echoes in their faces. The experience forever changed the ones that it didn’t kill.

I kept my promise to my ex-boyfriend, but I didn’t make it to Seattle until the following year. All that remained of CHAZ in 2021 was a community garden, which is now the green lawn of mowed grass I’m staring at while I sit here. That garden and the ghosts that haunt everyone I love.

CHAZ was a reprieve from culture. CHAZ was owning a gun and keeping a midnight watch. CHAZ was a fleeting glimpse into what really matters. CHAZ was all that has ever been real. CHAZ was the only chance we ever had to actually fight. CHAZ shattered the reality that internet drama or culture war means anything. The loss of CHAZ led to a lot of suicide.

4lung, in her song “Rat King World Champion - Quit While You're Ahead”, deals with the aftermath of there briefly existing a better world. Her lyrics–

“Oh my gosh I am so sorry! She gets so excited when we come here.”

“It’s fine,” I reply, taking off my headphones. The silence of the world hits me like a truck. I pet the dog. “What’s her name?”

“Maureen.”

“You have a very human name, Maureen.”

“She’s named after my sister,” says the woman as she takes a seat on the bench. We sit in silence for a few agonizing seconds before she breaks it. “You live here on the hill?”

“No, just visiting.”

“Family? Friends?”

“I’m going to commit suicide by cop. Elon Musk is in town to attend an esports event. I am going to point my fingers at him, shout bang, and be killed.”

I let the next few seconds of silence wash over me like a cool breeze. She responds, calmly, “Why?”

“What else is there left for me to do?”

“You could do it for real, if you’re sure you’re going to die anyway.”

I don’t think about it. I think about something else instead. I turn around and point to an apartment skyrise that wasn’t there a decade ago. I say, “I toured one of those apartments last year. I was so certain I was going to bring my girlfriend up here from California. It was a modest plan. We would both have jobs and we would barely scrape by living in a one-bedroom apartment. The real estate agent showed me around the room and I filmed it. I was so excited to show my girlfriend even that tiny place we could call our own. The agent took me around the building, showed me a gym I would never use, then up to the top floor. It’s beautiful up there: pool tables and grills and sun lounges and a killer view. I looked out and saw this whole park, all at once. A beautiful green lawn under a shining sun. The real estate agent smiled at me from behind her clipboard, talking about prices while I took in the breathtaking view of the world’s most beautiful graveyard. They burned our future and stuck an exorbitant price tag on its corpse.”

“Did you find a place to be with your girlfriend?”

“I did. It wasn’t here and it didn’t last long.”

She points at me. No, she’s pointing at one of my buttons. “It comes out in a couple days, you know? Don’t you want to be alive to see what happens next? And someday to see how it ends?”

At first I’m caught off guard. Then I remember how mainstream Deltarune is. I have to remind myself of that often. It still feels like a niche within a niche within a niche. A comic begets a game that begets a game. The further down the rabbit hole you go the closer you get to the surface. Obscurity is eroded by entropy. I respond truthfully, “It’s become hard to care.”

She looks almost… angry? “Given the option of a world-changing martyrdom or a continued search for meaning you choose… a pointless suicide? You’re gonna march up to the oppressor and ask to be excused? You’re gonna let a cop watch you bleed out in the street? Millions of people will know about you, and you’re wrong if you think you’ll be inciting anything in them. They’re all scared and you’re gonna make it worse.”

“Don’t ever volunteer for a suicide hotline ma’am, you’re awful at it.”

“Who do you blame?”

“I guess, ultimately, it's all my own fault.”

“So what now then? What the fuck now?”

“Now this is the part where we zoom out to reveal I haven’t been talking to anyone. You’re just a figment of my imagination. I made you up to have a different excuse to exposit than the last three monologues.”

I take a deep breath and zoom out again. West this time. The Front Bottom’s “Twin Sized Mattress”.

I came here a lot, on my worst days in Seattle. A maze-like bookstore with a bunch of live-in cats. When I’d hit a point where I could not stand to sit alone in my apartment for another moment, but could not dare to reach out to any of the friends I suspected of hating me, I’d come here and pet a cat. I was sure none of these cats held any grudges towards me, sure that none of them would recoil from my pet and complain “Um, actually I’ve hated you for years! I kept hoping you wouldn’t come back!” before issuing a restraining order.

I used to play a game here. I’d try to see if I could find a book containing someone I knew or someone that meant something to me. Well that version of the rules sounds a little easy because “liking an author” is enough for them to mean something to you, and plenty of people like plenty of common authors. The version of the ruleset that exists in my head is closer to “find a book containing knowledge that pertains to The Plot.” The Plot meaning… the things important to my own personal narrative. It’s much too late for me to be unpacking what that means. It’s not like it meant anything in the end, anyway, it would seem.

I take a seat amongst the science fiction books, the corner where the cats like to sleep in the sun. One that reminds me of a childhood pet is curled up in the windowsill. I run my fingers through its fur.

I’ve fallen, my knees screaming into the hot California cement. Sweat streams down my face and I can’t catch my breath. I can’t breathe at all. I’m dying. I just had to shovel some fucking rocks and it’s killing me. I’ve been given everything I’ve ever wanted and I can’t give back even this. I lost my temper and I screamed and I cursed and I made a fool of myself again. She’s going to be afraid of me like everyone else is. Everyone is afraid of me eventually. Because I’m rash and I’m angry and I’m violent. I couldn’t be reasonable. I had to lose myself and push myself until I was raw and bloody. I’m bleeding everywhere. I’m dying. No, I’m already dead. I’ve been dead. I killed myself in Seattle. I never made it out. I jumped off my roof and landed in Heaven and everything is so beautiful now that I don’t deserve it. I’m crying and screaming and bleeding in Heaven. I look up and see an angel so beautiful that I can’t belong here.

The cat yawns and stretches and walks away. I sit there a moment among the shitty Star Wars novelizations, listening to my suicide-playlist. “The Leaving”, Marcus Carline. I take my own, refusing to play the game. The old woman who runs the place is arguing with someone trying to resell books they just bought at the thrift store two blocks over. Outside the sun continues its onslaught.

I’m wandering at this point, stumbling through familiar streets. I try to focus on the music but I’m breathing too loud, thinking too fast. The steps don’t come naturally, I have to think about each and every one. I’m processing a thousand smells and sounds and a million sights. I can’t will myself to zoom out this time.

I tear off the headphones and collapse at the base of a tree. I close my eyes and imagine the feather. I count the numbers on London’s tattoo. I remember seeing a bunny. I saw it a few times, right here, on this street, when I would walk home late at night. I know where I am. I open my eyes.

That’s the roof I didn’t jump off.

I know just across the alley are the dumpsters I always liked the graffiti on. Rawrdcore’s fursona and a Sparkledog Clownpuppy. I always thought I was meant to meet the artists. I always meant to reach out to the artists. Just beyond that is a little sub-alley I could see from my old apartment’s balcony. I’d go out on it to smoke weed. The view from there was the wrong way, so I couldn’t see the city, just the alleyway where the homeless slept. I’d probably have died a lot sooner if that balcony was a bit higher. The five minute walk from my floor to the roof was enough of a mental gap to hold back the times the thoughts were just intrusive.

The sun starts to set and I take my place in the alley.

I’m lying on some concrete steps, looking up and imagining where the stars must be hiding behind the pollution, hoping the rabbit I know lives on this block hops by and reminds me how even such a pathetic creature can survive here longer than me.

I wonder what everyone I’ve ever known must be thinking. I wonder how many of them notice my absence. It’s just been a couple days without posting, surely none of them have noticed. I think of my girlfriend I left in California. She knows where I went but not what I’m doing. She thinks I’m rooming with a friend for a bit, just to get some space. She’s absolutely worried now that I’m not responding to all the texts. I consider calling her and telling her everything. I don’t.

It’s cold. It’s so fucking cold. I put too much brain power into thinking of the most boring thing to listen to while falling asleep, just for the sake of the reference. All for the sake of the reference. All I know is references. I give up searching for Glenda Jackson interviews and turn back on my suicide-playlist. I fall asleep listening to Will Toledo seeking reprieve from depression through dissociation.

Haven’t you?

Something between a dream and a feverish thought-spiral fills the entire sweltering night. Skeletons and ghosts dance amongst playing cards and chess pieces. The world unfolds like a dead origami unicorn and everything before me is a flat piece of darkness. I see a figure with its back to me. At the shadow’s edge the twilight reverie is shattered. A column of intense light, a blinding beautiful blue streaking into the ether. I can almost make out their face. I can almost hear the music. I can almost… I can’t. I can’t see anything.

I can’t see fucking anything. I’m laying on the cold pavement at three in the morning pretending that I care about anything. I’ve felt the same way every time I’ve ever gotten high: a small part of me is always perfectly conscious. I’m faking it. I’m faking everything. I could be fine if I wanted to and it’s all in my head. I squeeze my eyes shut and beg to dream more.

What if I never see more? What if I die not knowing–

God, what if she’s right? What if this insignificant anchor to reality will keep me bound here? What if I chicken out because, no matter how much I believe in what I’m doing, in the end I care too much about seeking more knowledge? I’m just gonna keep floating through life, a ghost tethered by unfinished business.

A friend leaves a suicide note lamenting that he won’t see the end of Homestuck and I know now a decade later that Shahrazad never stops spinning her tales.

My brain writes a dozen shitty dream sequences that my conscious mind rejects for being cliche.

I finally drag myself out of the alley after the sun is already rising into another clear blue sky.

Today is the day. I don’t mentally dwell on it.

I have another stop to make first. One more plot beat to hit. I pay for a bus fare with the ORCA card given to me by the ego-destructing manufacturing job I had a couple years ago. They made me pay for the card initially but then never asked for it back. Its magically gotten renewed both years since and I’m not complaining. We pass over Lake Union, heading north, towards Fremont. “The Mind Electric” on repeat.

That manufacturing job was actually split into two periods of temporary positions. In between the temp agency had me do a couple other odds and ends. Security check for a concert at the zoo was a fine one. The card shop inventory was not. I was so excited to be working with something I loved, Magic the Gathering, but it turned out to be the worst job experience of my life. A dozen people down in a basement, opening hundreds of packs of cards and sorting them by value. A frenzied repetition of destruction: peel the cellophane, crack open the box, surgically strip each card-pack of its glossy exterior. Endless trash bags of discarded skin and husks. Hundreds of Gandalfs and Frodos thrown into sorting bins. Mr. Salt wanted a golden ticket for his daughter. I ran screaming. I took the first bus home while they kept on ripping and tearing down there. I cried on the bus, quitting yet another job, when I looked out and saw Vladimir Lenin staring back and I knew everything was going to be okay.

That’s where I am right now.

He promised me so goddamn much. The pandemic hit and I sought any hope left in the world and I found it in books and in movements and in camaraderie. I slept through two decades of my life not caring about anything and suddenly I cared about everything. My enemies became my friends and I finally understood why anything on Earth was worth fighting for. My old friends became my new enemies and I could not comprehend why I could suddenly see what they still can not. My parents threatened to throw me out into the void of the pandemic and my once rival called me and told me everything was going to be okay. I sat on the curb feeling like I was about to die, crying into my phone, and she told me things would be okay. My whole damn world was flipped on its head.

Those were the best couple years of my life. I felt part of something. I felt like I had finally found out what it was all for. Every piece of media I had consumed and every day spent meticulously cultivating a social life and every night lost to lamenting how little I had done with my life all led here. The internet discourse and the social failures and the cloud-hosted scriptures all came together to form the singular Plot that kickstarted my Real Life.

We were going to save the world.

So what the hell happened? It all stopped as suddenly as it started. Every hope was dashed and every friendship burned and I found myself back where I had started. Am I here to follow through on my karmic destiny? Or am I just sick to fucking death of arguing with teenagers online? Am I just a sickly pessimistic person who can’t hold herself together enough to play her part in keeping the spirit of revolution alive? I should be teaching people as I was taught, forming the next generation, trying again. And here I am on a deeply selfish adventure trying to satiate the self-fulfilling prophecy the way one orders McDonald’s on UberEats. A quick, messy, expensive, destructive, self-indulgence.

I’m trying to dance. You should see me dancing. The Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again” is blasting on repeat through my headphones and I’m catching glimpses of Lenin’s hard stare towards the horizon with each pirouette. I want to dance and not have a care in the world. I’m going to die. I’m going to die today! I’m going to die today!

My footwork is sloppy. I took two years of dance classes to get out of Gym and now I’m just a crazy person stumbling in the middle of the street. I turn up the music louder. She’s down on her knees, my friend. Tears are streaming down my face, my friend. I’m dancing. I’m dancing and I don’t care that I’m about to die.

Why can’t you see it?

I’M GOING TO DIE.

I’M GOING TO DIE TODAY!

I’M GOING TO DIE AND I DON’T CARE!

I DON’T CARE!

I’M GOING TO DIE TODAY!

LOOK AT ME.

SOMEONE LOOK AT ME.

GOD PLEASE SOMEONE SEE ME.

I’m in the bathroom of a nearby pizza place. I’m shaving my face one last time. The final performance of a daily show that ran for 15 years. I’d have done it twice a day if I ever actually cared for the opinions of the spectators.

How many people will get hurt because of me? Am I just going to spur on the campaign of hate? Is every public appearance we make one that spurs on the campaign of hate against us? Should we hide? Should we pretend to not exist so that we may do so in secret? Do we beg for acceptance? Is rainbow capitalism today worth the inevitable genocide tomorrow? They will never accept us into the world as it exists. We have to make something new. We have to.

Back on the bus, heading south. I turn on something that isn’t on the playlist, something buried in my Youtube likes. “04 min 20 with Large Prime Numbers”. I don’t know the title, I don’t know the words. It’s just loud and emotional noise.

I wish I liked trains.

The light rail emerges from the tunnel and I breathe a sigh of a kind of relief the likes of which I have never felt before. As I watch Seattle fade once more into naught but a distant threat I suddenly remember that I had forgotten to tell you about how much I wish I liked trains. I just think it would be a neat autism to have. I could spend my days reading about the different models and makes, tracing routes on maps and researching the histories of stations and supply lines. I’d play railroad tycoons and watch those old VHS tapes they’d air the infomercials for. There wouldn’t be broken friendships, touchy subjects, callout posts, and endless balancing acts. I wouldn’t be traumatized by the punishments for being oblivious to feigned familiarity nor lost in the labyrinthine social web I spun myself into. I’d just like trains.

“I guess, ultimately, it's all my own fault,” as I catch my mind rewinding back to when I was 16, looking for a way to make some friends. All the things I got into, all the communities I joined, all the discourse I sought just because even that fucked up hate was one of the kinds of love we shared.

“I guess, ultimately, it’s all my own fault,” as it wanders back to when I was 23 and seeking any guidance at all. I had no plans for sleeping anywhere but the twin-sized mattress on my parent’s living room floor. I was beating my head against the wall, begging myself to make art good enough to absolve me of the sins of my fandom years.

“I guess, ultimately, it’s all my own fault,” and I’m saying goodbye to my dad at the airport, about to embark on the only real adventure I’ve ever been on. A lifetime of theme parks and movies did not prepare me for anything I faced when I chased a brighter future. He’s telling me to start living, to meet people, to have sex, to try drugs from the safety of my home. I think of his words as I’m standing in that accursed graveyard of a city for the first time, still blind, still naive.

“I guess, ultimately, it’s all my own fault,” and I’m listening to the Psycholonials soundtrack as the plane touches down in California and I’m given one more chance.

“I guess, ultimately…” I’m back on the light rail after my sixth botched suicide and I know I can’t blame myself anymore.

The bus stopped in front of the Climate Pledge Arena and I couldn’t get off. This was my stop. I knew this could be my stop. Musk would be there in 20 minutes and I could exit. And I didn’t. I just kept riding.

I let Youtube autoplay a song I had never heard before. My brain refused to decode the soundwaves and it all streamed through my brain like white noise.

I called my girlfriend. Told her I wanted to come home. She bought me a ticket on the earliest flight.

I couldn’t change the world. I wouldn’t have changed the world. Very few can. They’ve made it so hard for any of us to matter. It’s not a personal failing, I’m just another victim of oppression operating on a scale I cannot fathom. I should read more theory. I should make more friends. Right now I just need to stay alive. At least one more day. Even just one more day.

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