Aimee DeLong

 

Sometimes Suicidal by Aimee DeLong

Sometimes a suicidal person fixes her hair. Sometimes she looks in the mirror to smooth it. Sometimes she goes four days without washing it.

Last Night at Southport by Justin Hyde

tell her i'm a butterfly
with sixteen wings
beating in
succinct
anarchy.

Categorical Imperatives by Maurice Oliver

Try to imagine a small room where the only/ furniture is a TV. The TV has a hundred/ channels and two sets of memories.

Beerwigs by George Anderson

1. A canoe full of moose meat
2. Beerwigs
3. The Great Vodka Massacre
4. The Bootlegger & the Professor
5. Puke-O-Gram

Visual Art by Claudio Parentela

 

Sometimes Suicidal

Sometimes a suicidal person fixes her hair. Sometimes she looks in the mirror to smooth it. Sometimes she goes four days without washing it. Sometimes she avoids being seen in public because of it. Sometimes she goes out anyway.

Sometimes a suicidal person eats a whole bag of Kettle brand Krinkle Cut Salt & Fresh Ground Pepper Kettle Chips; the Yin Yang of spice. Sometimes she doesn't eat anything all day long. Sometimes she drinks after not having eaten anything. Sometimes she throws up.

Sometimes a suicidal person checks her email compulsively; up to a hundred times a day. Sometimes she emails people that she barely knows just to see if she can elicit a response. Sometimes she says nothing at all to those actually in the room with her. Often.

Sometimes a suicidal person weighs her options. If I kill myself now, she thinks, I'll never find out if my book ever gets published. Sometimes, she doesn't even care if her book ever gets published and she just thinks, Jon will be really mad if I kill myself.

Sometimes a suicidal person feels more trapped by living than by dying and fantasizes about it the way a faithful and delusional lottery ticket purchaser does buying a mansion in Malibu. Red. Blood. Dark Red Blood. Bath Water. Blades. Or. Pills. Lots and lots of pills. So many that there is no chance of miraculously surviving. Thousands. Different kinds. Drowning. Somehow selecting a passenger flight. She knows is going to CRASH. Gas and a myriad of OD options.
Sometimes a suicidal person just wants to go to sleep. Sometimes she wants to stay awake all night reading about something really specific, like why pugs are so stubborn and how to get them to be less so. But. Of course. Why would a person want to do that? They are so hilarious the way they are.

Sometimes a suicidal person has a difficult time deciding between chocolate and vanilla at a bakery selling cupcakes. Sometimes she thinks about going to the bakery but the thought of all the sneezey, snotty, sullen, sallow faces on the subway keep her home. Thinking about. Pills. Lots and lots of pills. So many that there would be no chance of miraculously surviving.

Sometimes a suicidal person will never talk about being suicidal to anyone else. Always she never does this. She wants to be just as normal as this guy or that girl. As normal as a dinner plate with all the alleged food groups represented on it. She wants to be normal like vitamins and brunch, like sunshine and heels that click, like those kind of women who have women friends who say things like, "I'll bring the ice cream!" When one of them is having an ice cream-worthy crisis. Boyfriends and fat days. She wants to be normal.

She wishes that she would not have blown off a night out at the bar with Jon. But. She also wishes she were feeling sane enough to sit up mildly straight on a stool and care about drinking whiskey. She wishes that she were only feeling the kind of shitty where alcohol is one's only escape. She wishes she were that happy.

Sometimes a suicidal person just wants to go to bed. She hopes she'll feel better in the morning. Honestly. She doesn't hope. Anything. She just wants to go to bed. She just wants to go to sleep. She doesn't even care if she dreams.

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Biography:

Aimee DeLong lives in Brooklyn and is in the process of submitting her novel, The Twenty Seven Year Old. Some of her writing can be found at http://www.hotelstgeorgepress.com/ and http://cherrybleeds.com/ She has a story appearing in the forthcoming issue of The The Wonder Boy Review. Slightly more information about Aimee can be found. Aimee is a non-habitual smoker and loves her life.