6.53 To London St Pancras

I've been waking up throughout the night, immediately with that heartache feeling that comes with lost love. And that sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach, like nothing will ever be ok again.

My mind is screaming all over the place, and I don't know if I'll be able to get back to sleep again. But making it through the day seems like an equally daunting proposition.

I have been thinking about suicide again. This morning I first woke up and decided I could slit my wrists in the bath, and let all the blood run out of me. I wondered if it would hurt a lot, and how sharp of a knife I would need. Would I need a special hunting sort of knife to make it easier?

Then I realised for whoever found me it would be horrible and thought that I'd have to contact the police to make sure they found me rather than N or my family. I tried to picture the letter I would write, and wondered how horrible it would be to read. But it's their job to deal with things like that I guess.

Later I thought it would be good to jump in front of a train, because they go so fast, and it would be over immediately. I know this really upsets drivers sometimes, but I would write a letter to make sure that they knew it wasn't their fault and that they couldn't have done anything to stop in time.

So I thought about the 6.53 to London St Pancras. The train I've been getting for a couple of years to go into the office. And all the business people on that train who would be late for work because the train plowed through my body like it was warm butter. And I thought that maybe I could make some artistic statement about the pointlessness of the rat race, and the endless search for wealth and efficiency whilst we leave out hearts rotting out on the newly dried tarmac. But it seems a little pretentious. Why should I be able to make that statement? What gives me the right to make my own death into a media story, or some sort of political statement? They'd probably say I was a victim of the economic downturn or something. An anonymous credit cruncher.

Part of me wants to go to America next week because they have guns. You can even buy them in Wallmart. And guns are the most perfect method of suicide invented. Click. Bang. Dead. The perfect killing machine.

That's not really why I want to go, but it's strangely comforting to know that although they are backward in a lot of ways, the ability to kill oneself easily seems to be a blessing to me right now, rather than a curse. It's strange how my mind works.

It's hard to do something with style and panache when you feel that way though. All of the famous suicides I can think of were pretty uninteresting in style, and even people who made political statements all of their lives, tend not to make one at a moment like that. I think because of what suicide really is. It's the inability to cope with life. It's not a positive action, and it's hard to imagine a positive action resulting from it. I don't know what Sylvia Plath wrote prior to sticking her head in an oven, (although admittedly, that's quite an unusual method these days) or what Kurt Cobain was thinking before he blew his head off.

Wikipedia says on Plath's death: 'Plath took her own life on the morning of February 11, 1963. Leaving out bread and milk, she completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with "wet towels and cloths."[9] Plath then placed her head in the oven while the gas was turned on.'

I don't know how she could do that. Although she seemed to have asked when her neighbour would be leaving the next morning, some people think she meant to be found because of the time she started her attempt. I think she perhaps started earlier so her children would still be asleep. The attending officer was sure she meant to die, as she thrust her head into the gas oven.

Something I didn't know before today was that Syliva's husband, the poet Ted Hughes had an affair with a woman called Assia Wevill. On March 23, 1969, Assia Wevill took her own life and that of their daughter in a manner that closely echoed Plath's suicide. Dragging a mattress into the kitchen, Assia sealed the door and window. She then lay her sleeping child down on the mattress and dissolved some sleeping pills for herself in a glass of whisky. Taking the pills, she turned on the gas stove, and lay down next to her daughter.

It's been said that Assia couldn't handle Hughes' consistent infidelity and inability to commit to her and her children, yet at the same time treating her as a housekeeper. It sounds like Hughes was a real piece of work, who used his lovers to his own gains, but without regard for their feelings. A lot of feminists still see their two deaths as a signifcant example of an abusive patriarchal relationship that ended terribly, and for a long time, people scratched his name from her gravestone, to try to honour her life without him. Perhaps feminism as the result of her death is some sort of positive action that has resulted from a suicide though.

I think if I were to be assessed this morning, suicide ideation would be one of my symptoms of mental disturbance. But today I am genuinely interested in what made people kill themselves, and how they did it.

On April 8, 1994, Cobain's body was discovered at his Lake Washington home by an electrician who had arrived to install a security system. Apart from a minor amount of blood coming out of Cobain's ear, Smith reported seeing no visible signs of trauma, and initially believed that Cobain was asleep until he saw the shotgun pointing at his chin. A suicide note was found that said, "I haven't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing . . . for too many years now". A high concentration of heroin and traces of Valium were also found in his body. Cobain's body had been lying there for days; the coroner's report estimated Cobain to have died on April 5, 1994.

From reading the articles on him, it seems Cobain again was a victim of lost love, and hope. Courtney Love is reported to have broken down in tears at his funeral and chastised him.

A lot of people pertain he as murdered. But I doubt it. It's reported that he had two prior close calls, one with an overdose of Rohypnol and champagne, and one where the police were called when he reportedly baricaded himself in a room with a gun.

The interesting thing about the suicides of famous people is that often their work, journals and thoughts prior to the event are all available to the public. Their private thoughts and feelings, especially when they are considered artists, are for public consumption and debate. I wonder how often that really happens with normal people. I think that normal people's sucicides just fade away. No one really remembers them but their friends and family.

I found a few interesting things about suicide. Having had previous sucicide attempts this makes me 23 times more likely to die of suicide than an average member of the population. Females make more suicide attempts than males, but apparently males are 4 times more likely to die from an attempt. It seems that 12-37% of people leave a suicide note (why it's such a range, I don't know) which means the majority don't.

When I took the overdose last time, I didn't write a note. Mainly because my thoughts were torn, I didn't really want to die, just to stop the pain. I wonder if this is the same for many people. That there is always an element of doubt, and that is why they don't always succeed, or leave a note. I described my first attempt to N as a 'failure' to commit suicide. She disliked the way I had described it. It told me a lot about the way I saw it.