No Note;

Please do not think I am attempting to be morbid by writing this blog. I have an assignment for my Modern and Contemporary Literature class to write an imitation of sorts of a work we have read thus far. I chose to replicate the suicide of Septimus, a character in Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, with the suicide of my aunt. The style is slightly odd because that is Virginia Woolf's strategy and part of the assignment. 

The subject is real.

She was finally left in peace; in silence; in tranquility. The drugs had taken their near paralyzing effect, and her mind entered a world she had become all too familiar with. Slowly, slowly; she slipped into a limbo of nostalgia. She remembered her mother saying, “If you just accept God into your life again, Jennifer, then you can come away from all of this. You can be whole again.” The words resonated in the air, she must be whole again; she must come back. “Why does everyone have power over my life but me?” “Why God?” “Why my mother?” “Why the drugs?” “I have lost complete control, or perhaps I never had it to begin with.”

She couldn’t bare the thoughts; the loss of power; the loss of sanity. It was all encompassing. Her children were gone, stripped away from her care because some deemed it inadequate. But perhaps it was; perhaps she herself was inadequate. The disappointment was staring her down! Where were the drugs? the only things that made any sense to her…

And she snorted line after line; the venomous, white powder grazed the inside of her nostrils; they were now red and raw, and she, she didn’t have a care in the world. Not in those moments.

So she got some rope from the garage and made a noose- no one could tell her what to do anymore. “I am no longer powerless.” “There is no longer a must, nor a will to live.” She could do this; she could and she would. The one thing no one else could manage in her life was, in fact, her life. She would no longer be at the mercy of neither family nor friends, neither deities nor drugs. And as she struggled up the stairs, nearly falling back twice as a result of the cocaine, she passed the pictures of her children along the walls; tiny faces once smiling back at the camera man, and now her. They were smiling at her. “I’ll miss you, but I have always loved you.”

Falling from great heights would do the trick; the balcony was the perfect base. But no, too public. Death is sacred, even in haste. She considered her husband’s handgun he kept in the bedside drawer for safety, but no, “he will have no part in this,” she exclaimed! The attic door caught the corner of her tired, watery eyes, and she knew. She knew how she would leave this world, her family, herself.

The plan was literally falling into place. No one was home. No one would check for hours. Just enough time to scrape her last breaths from her tired lungs. The knotting became more and more difficult as the drugs became stronger; there was no time for a note; no time for an explanation; no time for second thoughts…

There was, however, time to wrap the rope around her neck and pull. She pulled for her life, for her death; and then she fell. She fell from the opening of the attic in the ceiling, and was immediately jerked back up slightly by the resistance of the rope. She hung there in pity, more powerless than ever before.