I never felt my loneliness so clearly.
–Frédéric Chopin, letter to Jan Matuszyński, 26 December 1830
1. You go to the supermarket late at night, not to buy something, but only to be around people.
2. You spend all afternoon listening to voice messages on your phone you haven’t deleted, messages from as far back as ten years ago, some from ex-girlfriends, others from now deceased friends.
3. You haven’t spoken to a single soul for months on end. Suddenly, one afternoon, someone stops you on the street, asking for directions. You lift your head up and, gripped by panic, go to make off. You resist the impulse to flee but you can’t find the words to respond, producing only faint gibberish. By the time you try to make eye contact again, the other person is nowhere to be seen. You wonder whether there ever was another person.
4. You steal clothes from the department store, in the hope of getting caught, in the hope of sitting around a table with police officers, in the hope of being offered a tea and being asked a few questions, any questions.
5. You collapse one night, waking up on the kitchen floor in the early hours of the morning, blood streaming from your head. You call an ambulance to take you to hospital. Lying on a bed in ED, a nurse asks about your medical history. Then she asks for the name and number of your emergency contact. You just lie there, a blank look on your face.
6. First thing in the morning, you step barefoot onto the dewy grass in the backyard wearing only a faded blue robe, and you have your first cigarette and coffee under an overcast sky. As a small streak of sunshine emerges, you leave your house, headphoned, wearing the same jumper and jeans you’ve been wearing all year, and you begin walking leisurely along the pavement, then you slowly pick up pace and soon you are jumping and dancing all over the place to the booming beats of an obscure Norwegian DJ, inaudible to the bemused passersby. At intersections you halt but continue swinging your arms and legs a little, animated by something imperceptible, awful but joyful. You go to a bowling alley, dancing in your own lane after each delivery, which inevitably lands in the gutter, provoking taunts and guffaws from the school kids in the nearby lanes. After a burger lunch you return home to check on your bedridden dad, then you’re back out again, humming and bouncing your way to the local AZ store, where you stock up on chemical products, then put on mask and gloves and meticulously slice and boil, drain and dry. Hours later, night fallen, substances ingested, you start dancing again, more manically than ever, the empty room lit up only by the fairy lights in which you are draped, the sweat trickling into your eyes, mingling with tears. You rush out into the street, boring through thick fog, the fairy lights attracting cars like moths to a flame, winding their windows down to throw insults and food at you, or sweeping right past to splash puddles of water; oblivious, you continue making your way into the darkness, until you reach the shore, dancing on the sand until the first faint rays of the sun appear, slipping slowly, slowly as the sound grows louder and louder, into the sea.
7. On your phone, on your couch, stretched out with nothing on, clutching your throbbing dick while watching a milky-skinned goth girl, wearing nothing but smoky red eyeshadow and black lacquered lips, her white round breasts swinging free, their tips erect, as she grinds her curvy hips over her pink cuddly bunny doll, her landing strip rocking back and forth, her juices seeping onto the doll’s soft fur face, her moaning becoming louder, her thrusting faster, you could almost feel her warm breath, almost touch her moist pussy and smell its muskiness, and you wonder how long it’s been since you last saw and felt and sucked and entered a cunt like this; your cock suddenly bursts and spurts right into your own mouth, the hot and salty slime spilling down your chin.
8. You write and speak in dead languages. On occasion, when compelled, you employ the official language but in an exceedingly eloquent and erudite way—e.g., taking playful delight in the ordering of words, making frequent use of the imperfect subjunctive, sprinkling sentences with Latin and Shakespeare, pausing for a seemingly interminable time after each thought, relentlessly name-dropping pre-Socratic philosophers, packing your speech with poetic devices, from anaphora and alliteration to dactylic hexameter.
9. On your bedside table there is a crumpled questionnaire with only the following question, still unanswered:
QUESTIONNAIRE
During the last 24 hours I felt the chances of my killing myself were:
□ nonexistent
□ very low
□ low-medium
□ fifty-fifty
□ high-medium
□ very high
□ I have written the farewell note and loaded the gun
10. You make it your life’s goal to write down all the words of the English language.
11. You close the curtains in your room, and in the darkness of the day you say: En fait je n’attends rien, je me rends seulement absent.
12. You have only one friend left in the world, having severed all contact with everyone else long ago, including family. And even this one friend you haven’t seen in several years. Each year you buy a Christmas card, write it out to him, but then delay in sending it, until Christmas arrives and then you throw out the card. Year in, year out: the same routine. But last year you finally mustered the courage to post the card. A week into the new year you receive a card in the mail. Your ecstatic joy evaporates as soon as you realize that the card is the same one you had sent, but now comes with a return to sender sticker and a note scribbled on the back: deceased.