The day I decided to die, I watched the sun disappear into the San Francisco Bay.
As the orange ripples spread through the water, I made my way to a subway station, sat on a blue steel bench and waited for the eastbound train to Oakland. I’d been drinking whiskey mixed with flat Coke all afternoon to work up the nerve to jump in front of the train, and I was drunk enough that my plan felt within reach. I was 23. Two months earlier, my mother had tried to take her life, and I had interrupted her attempt. This experience, compounded by years of depression and addiction, made me long to stop feeling. It’s not that I wanted to die, exactly, it’s that I didn’t want to live.
