My Most Memorable Valentine's Days
Saturday, February 15th, 2003 07:59 amThis first account is one I sent to my favorite mailing list a couple of years ago:
1994. It was a generally rotten day to begin with--migraine coupled with exhaustion--mitigated only by my observing some amusing V-Day encounters while I was hanging around campus (people reciting lovely poetry to each other, such as "Roses are red/Violets are black/You'd look much better/with a knife in your back"), and, with my father out celebrating with his girlfriend, I was really quite relieved to get home where I could relax and listen to music in solitude.
Somewhere around 9 p.m., my closest friend called up from campus (we'd both dropped out of school by then, but still hung around the place) and started telling me about her day. Then she began giving me addresses and phone numbers and telling me what she wanted me to tell everyone she knew after she had killed herself.
So, I spent the last 3 hours of Feb. 14 trying to talk her out of suicide. It was a wide-ranging conversation, really, involving art and literature, philosophy and religion, adoption and foster care, and quite a few other things I've forgotten. Some of it would've been hysterically funny if it had been in a work of fiction--even she managed to laugh at a lot of it, in spite of everything. After she hung up on me, I called the campus police and talked to them for a while, glad that I'd heard enough of the background noise to know which bank of phone booths she'd called me from. They managed to get to her in time, got her admitted to the local hospital, where she remained for a while. Soon after she got out, she decided to stop speaking to me, reasoning that my dialing 911--when I knew how she hated the police, social workers, doctors, and everyone else who makes their living "interfering in other people's lives"--was an act of betrayal.
( Read more... )
1994. It was a generally rotten day to begin with--migraine coupled with exhaustion--mitigated only by my observing some amusing V-Day encounters while I was hanging around campus (people reciting lovely poetry to each other, such as "Roses are red/Violets are black/You'd look much better/with a knife in your back"), and, with my father out celebrating with his girlfriend, I was really quite relieved to get home where I could relax and listen to music in solitude.
Somewhere around 9 p.m., my closest friend called up from campus (we'd both dropped out of school by then, but still hung around the place) and started telling me about her day. Then she began giving me addresses and phone numbers and telling me what she wanted me to tell everyone she knew after she had killed herself.
So, I spent the last 3 hours of Feb. 14 trying to talk her out of suicide. It was a wide-ranging conversation, really, involving art and literature, philosophy and religion, adoption and foster care, and quite a few other things I've forgotten. Some of it would've been hysterically funny if it had been in a work of fiction--even she managed to laugh at a lot of it, in spite of everything. After she hung up on me, I called the campus police and talked to them for a while, glad that I'd heard enough of the background noise to know which bank of phone booths she'd called me from. They managed to get to her in time, got her admitted to the local hospital, where she remained for a while. Soon after she got out, she decided to stop speaking to me, reasoning that my dialing 911--when I knew how she hated the police, social workers, doctors, and everyone else who makes their living "interfering in other people's lives"--was an act of betrayal.
( Read more... )
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