My wife and I are sitting on the couch talking about suicide. I grow frustrated as we move through the psychological perambulations of self-annihilation because the talking makes me feel weak.

I can’t tell her for certain that I will never kill myself. We are looking into one another and I am impatient to be done talking about it because I have no good answers.

This is a part of my mind and a fracture in my heart that I would keep secret from her forever if I could, to protect her from the ugliness within.

The love in her eyes grounds me.

It reminds me that I am not angry at her, that I am not impatient with her, that I am angry and impatient with myself. That I am feeling my own failings so acutely in this moment that I would do nearly anything to escape the overpowering self-knowledge that I am a broken and imperfect man.

These feelings are the enemy.

They are the threats that have defined my life. They weaken me, they undermine me, they make me doubt my strength. They are the monsters that I must master and overcome or else they will destroy me.

All I want to do is tell her is that I will forever be breathing right next to her, to swear blood oaths on it, to put my heart circulating love with every beat on display by tearing through my ribcage.

To tell her that the love is the guarantee. But I can’t.

It is hard for her when I say, “I haven’t killed myself yet,” because the yet says that it might happen, but that’s not what I’m trying to tell her with this statement and our communication skips a beat as we sit in silence for a moment.

I stare at my hands. I am not leaving the door open to hurt her.

This yet is a statement of victory. It is a reminder that I have conquered the vile, ugly worm at the center of my soul for nearly two decades. That I haven’t given in, yet, and I may never give in. As long as I am here I am winning the fight.

I explain and then we are back. Together. Here. In the moment. We understand one another. It is inevitable. It will be back and when it is I will attack it and gnash my teeth and kick it in the fucking balls as hard as I can and then I’ll run for my life, hoping that I am fast enough to survive it.

I can’t let myself forget, I tell her. If I forget that I have this thing inside I won’t be ready next time it comes.

This thing simultaneously defies rationality and feels like the apogee of my rational enquiry. When I am caught in it I can’t see the things I have built with her, I can only see the staggeringly large and crushing Universe. I can only see my smallness and insignificance.

The voice of self-destruction howls in my ear and my life and my work and my struggles shrink to nothing. They are inconsequential.

There is no talking through it when I am in it. No setting the chessboard of my life in a series of classical problems that I can learn to solve and resolve as I search for the most quick and efficient victory.

Suicide seizes me like a giant’s hand. He grabs me by the chest and rips off the top of my skull and pops my eyeballs between his massive teeth and flings me on the ground where I bounce like a rag doll with a broken neck. Sightless, thoughtless, perspectiveless as I whirl howling into the center of a black hole – these writings and notes and thoughts the desperate x-rays at the edge of the event horizon the only things to escape the awfulness that is crushing me into oblivion one atom at a time as I stretch to infinity, breaking and screaming and crying.

When the storm hits all I can do is grab the nearest rock and fight to keep from being hurled into space.

We talk and talk. My anger waxes and wanes. I control this feral dog because it is not her I want to destroy, it is myself. I’m mad because I have never found a solution.

Suicide is something we are both intimately familiar with in our own ways. She understands and I understand and finally we have circled to the center of it. We are imperfect and partial creatures. We do the best we can.

The struggle is easier when we have one another. This is a plain and simple and reassuring truth.

As long as we have love we have something worth fighting for.