laced water

For the sake of purgation, I will tell you how I planned to kill myself.

The first few weeks after receiving the "news" was my vulnerable point. I was lost, confused, afraid and traumatized rolled into one. The first sentence that always crop up in my mind just as I opened my eyes to greet the new day was: "I'm sick...forever."

Given my volatile emotions, devious bordering on the genocidal thoughts entered my head. I thought of suicide. I knew that I had the capacity to end all my misery if I would take my life into my own hands.

Different modes of suicide ran into my head. Here you have the classic wrist slash. Then you have the Japanese-inspired harakiri. I don't have a gun so Russian roulette is ruled out. But all those things would entail bloodshed. I want a bloodshed-free suicide—sans the melodramatic scene where my mom, wallowed in her tears and all, would clean up my HIV-infected crimson blood. What to do?

I suddenly recall this piece I read about silver cleaners. I do know my science that I came across the potential of silver cleaners to kill life. And strangely though, without ever looking if we have that in our house, I recall that one day, while looking for a medicine, there was a weird container sitting at the far end of the cupboard. When I took it, it was a silver cleaner. Voila!

So how does it work? Well, you take a scoop of it (I guess). And you mix it with water. What you have now is a laced water with cyanide, the poison used to sting dead fish in the sea. The cleaner won't have any color so it would still look like plain water. And you drink it. I just don't know if it would react immediately with the body. But given if I could still move around for a couple of minutes, I still planned to wash the glass I took. Put back the container in place, and lie down on our divan. So that by the time someone noticed that I'm dead, they would just thought that I'm sleeping. Besides, death to silver cleaner is without bloodshed (I guess). Without blood pouring all over me, I would just have saved my family from another round of housework. Haha.

Levity aside, suicide is just a thought for me. It's not a tendency. Human as I am, I guess my sanity was just clouded during the days when I thought hope was bleak. But, nah, putting a period in my life is a cheap shot. It's a futile act. It's for the coward.

I told this story to two close friends and to my mom and all told me that it's just plain stupid because I wouldn't know how strong I could be if I'll just ending up killing myself. There will be blunders in my life—and I think having HIV is by far the biggest of it as of now—but life is about moving on, getting past the depression point, still expecting for sunshine just when life already rained so hard on you and reminding yourself that just like Pandora's story, hope is always the last to go.

Days after I told my suicidal thought to my mom, I was back again at the cupboard looking for a medicine. This time, when I searched for the weird container, it was gone.