The Girl on the Car in Parking Lot

Adam,

I'm sure you've heard it a million times, but you saved my life. That's as good of a place to start as any, right? It was 1994 and I was nineteen. At that young age I had already been through so much, hopefully all I would ever go through that was wrong and dirty and bad. My past was like a trailer park set in a swamp and I wanted to escape it so badly. It was like breathing through a wet sponge all the time. Gasping and working so god damned hard but there was never enough air.

I was working for a telemarketing agency trying to "find" myself after quitting college. I was in love with an addict and had been for two years at that point. I didn't know what he was when I started dating him, only that his hands were the first to make me feel clean. He was beautiful, and he loved me as long as he could. I held us together for the rest of the time with low expectations and a willingness to bail his ass out every time he needed me.

At first I thought his lifestyle was exciting. That was before the first time he was beaten unrecognizable and I had to explain to his eight year old brother and his anguished mother how he ended up in the hospital. He was never very smart about dealing. He pinched from the product and always came up short on cash. How someone with that little ambition continued to work his way up the food chain to the big time is still beyond me. He fucked with the wrong people eventually though. You know, the last time I saw him he was hiding out because he had ratted someone out to save his own skin.

Nothing ever changes with him.

After the first year I started wondering why he always chose the drugs over me. It broke me every time. I'd be so close, holding on to the edge and he'd see a joint on the horizon and let me go. And he always knew when to call. He always knew when I was just over him enough to stand on my own to feet. He always knew the language to serenade me. "I was thinking I needed to get to know you again." "I light a candle every night and talk to it like it was you".

By the second year we were in the trailer park and although it wasn't clear to me yet itwas already hopeless. He was cheating on me with a 16 year old and he blamed me every time he failed himself, thinking all the time he was failing me. All I ever wanted was his love. I was a dumbass. Dumbass is just a synonym for naivety.

I was partying all the time now. Staying up until 4 AM, popping some white crosses to stay awake at work or worse, going in stoned or drunk. I'd work until 3 and go right back out and do it all over again.

I was depressed and it was getting worse. All the time I thought about dying. I didn't want to kill myself, not yet. I just wanted to curl up and let someone else take care of business for a while. I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted the sadness to stop I wanted the worry to stop stop stop Stop STop STOp STOP. It hurt all the time.

And then there was the Day of Peace. Our Lady of Suicide come to visit in my head. It was all so clear, so simple. I spent all day at work thinking about it. It was a relief, really, to have the decision made. No more work to be about, no more plans to be made. The simplest decisions crawling off the table like cockroaches.

On my lunch break I wrote the note. My plan was to drive off a bridge. I didn't know which bridge, and I don't know why the fuck I chose that, but it seemed fitting. I'd been drowning for years.

So I drove. I don't remember where. I just remember opening the door to the car to get out and hearing 'Round Here. It was a pretty song. I sat back down, closed the door and turned it up.

There's a girl on the car in the parking/she says man you should try and take a shot/can't you see my walls are crumbing/she looks up at the building/says she's thinkin' of jumping/she says she's tired of life/well she must be tired of something/round here, she's always on my mind/round here, we've got lot's of time.

Those words pierced me like a scorpion sting as their meaning spread through me like poison. The view from my building was immediately more focused and everything was so clear. I was being held in the hand of God and allowed to see behind the curtain. It was frightening in its glory.

And I didn't do it.

I was so scared at what I had almost done I went straight home. I made an appointment to see a therapist the next day. It's amazing how quickly they will see when you use keys to open the door like the word Suicide. The trick is, once you go in, they don't let you back out again for a very long time...