This Is How by Augusten Burroughs Page B

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    What I did think to ask was, “But doesn’t the hot water hurt worse than the razor blade?”
    I was told that very hot water burns at first but then almost right away it feels cool. And standing there at the sink quite nearly trembling with an unlikely excitement, as though I was about to load a video game I had waited for since the previous spring, I turned the hot water spigot all the way to the left and I waited until there was a film of steam clinging to the mirror above the sink and then I closed my eyes and lowered my hand into the basin.
    I felt a hideous scrape of pain across my knuckles and my instinct was to yank my hand from beneath the faucet and plunge my fist into a refrigerated horse liver; a snowbank would be far too fluffy and useless.
    Instead, I repositioned my hand so that the hot water hit the tender underside of my wrist and from this small area arose a sensation so enormous and psychologically overwhelming it could not be described as “hot” or anything other than what it truly was: a room that imprisoned the mind.
    Almost instantly, there was a belch of decompression as this stunning sensation beyond mere “hot” became simply a feeling: uncomfortable—now, it was hot—before transforming yet again into the most unlikely sensation of cold.
    My fingers began to feel plump and stiff, as though it might be difficult now to make a fist.
    And just like that my hand was numb.
    It was like an object that my arm bone had decided to carry around—something I was no longer responsible for and didn’t have to care about anymore.
    I turned off the hot water and turned on the cold and my lip-red hand burned more at this cold than it had at the hot.
    I knew then: I can do this.
    I can numb both wrists and then climb into the filled bathtub and slice them open lengthwise with one of the razor blades in the medicine cabinet.
    My blood would pump, pump, pump into the tub in silky, crimson ribbons before dispersing into a vaporous cloud and turning all the water in the bathtub red.
    I would be transported from what to me seemed like the most hopeless and appalling childhood it was humanly possible to have and into a place of release and, ultimately, silence.
    I KNEW ALMOST AS SOON as I imagined my delivery into this place of release and silence that there could not possibly be such a place.
    Peace and release, silence and escape: these were some of the promises suicide made. The problem was, you would have to still be alive to experience the benefits.
    The overhead fluorescent lighting of logic had switched on and I saw the design flaw of suicide: if your life is so emotionally painful or empty or just something you desperately need to shed and escape from, suicide is exactly the opposite of what you want because you will still feel these feelings as you angle the corner of the razor blade into your flesh or you curl your lips around the fistful of pills. The steps one must take to initiate asuicidal act and carry it through to completion do not alleviate feelings of depression or provide a feeling of relief; if they did, the suicide would be stopped in progress.
    The hardwired human instinct to survive is extremely powerful. It is the reason even the most willful person will not attempt a suicide by holding their breath and then plunging their head into a bathtub.
    If the steps involved in executing one’s suicide provided one with even the slightest sense of relief or peace or anything at all that reduced the intensity of emotional pain, isolation, hopelessness—if there was any improvement in mood at all, the instinct to survive would plow over the suicidal impulse and the suicide would be aborted.
    I saw that in fact, the act of suicide would add—not subtract—to one’s feelings of misery. Because even the swiftest method of suicide involves particular steps and is not instantaneous.
    If you choose, for example, to cut your wrists in the tub as I had planned to do, once you’ve sliced