LatinosUSA

Content Warning: Thoughts of suicide

The boy was thirteen, and it was the most peaceful summer of his life. The house was quiet and clean because his mother was not there to yell or scream or make it messy. This summer, he could do his chores in peace, without his mother’s screaming and verbal brutality. It was the first time he didn’t think of suicide.

His mother was off to take a summer class at a college out of town. This was engineered by the boy’s aunt, his mother’s younger sister. Years later, this aunt explained to him that she had wanted to give him a break from his mother, and this was the only solution she could come up with.

He was used to doing all the work. It was second nature by now. Since he was a young child, his mother demanded that he take care of the younger children, the cooking, and the cleaning. Now he was also responsible for the large garden, the chickens and their eggs, and the assorted dogs and cats around the house.

~~

He first considered suicide when he was two, when his mother screamed at him for wetting his pants. As he grew older, he began to investigate different possible ways to kill himself. He could not endure the work and the abuse any longer. He wanted out. He wanted to be invisible so his mother couldn’t find him and demand work from him. How could he end it all?

He thought about jumping out of a barn. There were lots of large barns around. There was one behind his house. Both sets of grandparents had their own barns. If he didn’t want any of them, there were plenty of other barns in the neighborhood. This appealed to him until one day another boy in his class came to school with his arm in a sling. He broke it while jumping out of a barn. If such an act didn’t kill that boy, how could he hope it would kill him? The boy gave up that idea.

From his house, the boy could hear a distant train whistle. The train could kill him! But the boy lived miles from the train, and he had no idea when a train would pass. So, he gave up that idea too.

He didn’t even consider letting a vehicle on the road in front of his house hit and kill him. There was very little traffic, maybe only one or two vehicles a day, and the driver was usually a relative. They would stop. Anyone would stop. That idea would never work.

Could he be killed by jumping out of their car as it sped down the road? This idea intrigued him until the day when his little brothers were playing, like normal, in the back seat of the car as it went down the road and the bump opened the door latch. They spilled out onto the gravel road, and their mother slammed on the brakes and yelled at them to get back in and be still. The boy knew that idea wouldn’t work.

He heard about slitting a wrist and bleeding to death. That did not appeal to the boy. First, the cutting would hurt, and he didn’t want more pain. Second, if he did not die, he was sure his mother would insist that he clean up the blood.

He wanted something that would not cause him any more pain and would succeed. He couldn’t bear the thought that his mother might complain that he was too stupid to kill himself. She already labeled him fat, lazy, and asinine. Failure would just confirm it.

He finally settled on two peaceful methods that appealed to him. The first was sleeping pills. What a lovely idea! Take some pills, go to sleep, and never wake up. But there were no pills in the house. None in either of his grandparents’ houses, none in any of his aunts and uncles houses. He was never allowed to be alone in a store, so he couldn’t steal any. He was never allowed any money, so buying pills was out of the question.

The other possible peaceful method was gas. He heard that breathing gas fumes could put him to sleep and he could die. The family did have such gas.

~~    

During his junior year of high school, something inside the teenage boy snapped. The hallway walls of his school moved. They wove back and forth. Some of the halls were curved, and the curves moved in gentle undulations. As they moved, they changed from one pastel color to another. The boy struggled to find his way from one classroom to another.

Nothing was solid anymore. The normal sounds that ricocheted off the cement walls were sharper and more strident. The boy just wanted to curl up and hide from everything. He wanted quiet. He wanted peace. It was all too much!

One day, sitting at his desk, he lost contact with the walls, lights, and noise around him. Deep, deep into himself, his world became very quiet. He felt safe, at last. He was alone, safe, quiet, and dark for a long time. And he wanted to stay there.

After a time, he realized that he wasn’t quite alone. Another being was present. Maybe more than one, he couldn’t tell. The other was peaceful and gentle, and radiated acceptance and love. The boy never felt this before. His father was kind to him and loved him, but this went beyond that. This was something solid, more real than anything else he had known. He wanted to be part of it, and suddenly, he was. The boy did not care how it happened. It just was.

The peace was beyond imagination. The boy could finally relax. He was finally at peace. This was what his heart and soul ached for all his life. He was now there. It was true. He was home. He was content. He could see stars and galaxies. They surrounded him. All was peaceful perfection. HE was peaceful perfection. There could be nothing greater than this.

After a time that was not time, the boy began to create. New stars came into existence. These stars became suns as worlds appeared around them. The boy delighted in these new worlds. How did their geophysical mechanics work? He experimented with plate tectonics, volcanism, seismic waves, weather patterns, ocean flow, magnetic fields, with rotation, stratification, all sorts of things. This was amazing!

Millennia of human years passed. Epochs succeeded each other. Finally, after eons, the boy was ready to move on. He thought and thought, and gradually, he disappeared.

There WAS a greater Glorious Bliss!