The other night I had the most vivid dream I’ve probably ever had—one that left an indelible impression on my mind, and one I feel compelled to convey in a post. In the dream I found myself peering down at the Merrimack River whooshing beneath this rickety bridge on whose edge I was standing. For those who aren’t familiar with it, the mighty Merrimack is a long snaking river that slinks its way down from central New Hampshire into northeastern Massachusetts where it makes a hard left and a mad dash for the Atlantic. During the heyday of America’s textile industry, the Merrimack powered the glum brick textile mills of Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill, where mill girls toiled laboriously for half the day and maddeningly loud shuttle looms—with their noisy clunker clunk, clunker clunk, clunker clunk—bellowed in rooms that were hot and crowded. And strangely, I was thinking about all of this as I slept. In the dream, I was thinking about the mills, about the workers, about hydropower, in what was a sort of running historical narration going on in my suicidal mind in this most crazy of dreams. And now, this utilitarian river, with some help from gravity, would be put to practical use once again, this time to kill me.I remember thinking how dark it was, even for nighttime. In that darkness I began to question my decision to go to that bridge to end it. That is, I questioned my choice of bridge, not the decision to end my life; to me, death was already a fait accompli; jumping was a mere formality. And while standing on that imagined bridge I thought, we are all dead already anyway. We are in fact the walking dead, wandering through a vast desert of civilization filled with mirages beckoning us with sexy but ultimately empty apparitions. The apparitions are real enough to us, but they are devoid of meaning.
I kept looking down at the river and realized it was the only thing in the universe that was real. I wasn't even real. But the river was real, and it was reality itself; it was fate itself; and it was waiting to swallow me whole and carry me out to the ocean where I'd float forever.
I could faintly see the outline of jagged rocks protruding from the surface of a frenzied current. Not far enough of a drop, I thought. Then I began thinking about the few people I knew of who had gone over in fatal freefall in the past couple of years. Was it three dead? I wondered. Yeah, three. But was it three who went over, or four? Is the success rate 100% or 75%? It mattered.
As I was trying to figure out the collective batting average of the bridge’s leapers, I suddenly arrested my thoughts. This was exactly the sort of behavior that got me in trouble in the first place. Too much Goddamn thinking. Catching myself in the act was all the cue I needed. As I fell faster and faster towards the water and serrated rocks below, I thought about what my death certificate ought to say for a cause of death instead of just “massive head trauma” or “drowning” or some such nonsense. I struggled for a moment before thinking the words, ‘acute pensiveness.’ It was all I could come up with under the circumstances. Inelegant, but accurate. Truth matters. I was going to die just how I had lived: over-thinking, and about things you wouldn’t expect given that I was either about to die, or survive with injuries that would make me regret that I hadn’t.
I hit the water. It was even darker now than before.
~Max
