Savannah Lee

Enough to kill me.

The first thing I did was become not-myself. I became a man, a postman in fact, a pale one with a face no one had ever seen.

He took the pills and got out of his clothes. Onto his back he pasted his "forwarding stamps," which in this particular dream were a very normal everyday item. Crinkly and dark iridescent blue, they were meant to ensure that his body would be "forwarded." Everyone knew where. It was so obvious, no one needed to say it or even think it.

Decorated with plenty of forwarding stamps, our well-drugged mailman then walked around behind his windowless white apartment building to a compost shitpile. He climbed on top of it. In his world, this was a meaningful and accepted suicide procedure. He arranged himself in a fetal position.

At that point I separated myself out from him. It wasn't that I didn't want to finish committing suicide, it was that I didn't like how I was getting there. I felt sick from all the pills, the shit was kind of gross, and I could no longer ignore that there were some ethical problems with taking myself out of my family. I was going to have to back out and Embrace Life. So I walked away from the postman, who, as far as I know, completed his death and has been properly forwarded.

The problem was that, when I was him, I had swallowed the pills too. I went up to one of those vague not-really-anyplaces that you often see in dreams which was meant to approximate an office. Without ever actually using a telephone, I called 911.

"Mumble mumble mumble," said the indifferent dispatcher.

I waited.

Nothing more.

"Um...what did you say?" I humbly asked.

"I said check into the Jerry," said the now-very-annoyed dispatcher, who hung up.

Fortunately, I was too sedated to be alarmed by the lack of help. I walked barefoot down an unpaved road that was simultaneously dusty and muddy, with the worst features of both. I passed rows of front desks like old western saloons. Cosmetic-surgery front desks, private-dressing-service front desks, electroshock-therapy front desks, a front desk where Sandra Bullock in a black-and-white tennis dress was freaking out because she would never be as thin as "they" wanted her to be.

I came to a feminist suicide recovery front-desk where the clerk offered me a 500% discount on part of my stay. (I think it had something to do with the second weekend.) When I declined the discount, the clerk said "Are you sure?" and I realized I was being stupid and took it. The desk clerk handed me two tennis balls and a racket and pointed me towards a row of mud-brown courts with broken nets. This seemed to be the plan for detoxing me.

At that point my husband arrived to visit me. He was not particularly thrilled by what I had done (and he'd found out about it how...?), but was focused on the tennis-intensive recovery ahead.

Someone gave me a tiny, almost doll-sized glass of orange juice.

Then I realized I was going to have to explain to my mother why I was in a feminist suicide recovery clinic. I was so embarrassed by that that I woke up.

#

It was a *long* time before I got back to sleep.