Content warning: extended discussion of suicidal ideation.

I can’t kill myself today.

I drive to work through the forest. It’s nothing like home – I never truly feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere, Connecticut is too dense for me to ever not feel surrounded by people – but it’s the closest I get.

I thought in February that, once the snow cleared, the trees wouldn’t be beautiful anymore. Then the snow did clear, and I was wrong, and the regrowing of leaves made the forest seem thicker than before.

And the greens are rich. I forget that colors are deeper here. I remember staring out at a tree from the second floor of Stoeckel Hall during one of my first classes at Yale. I watched it turn red through the fall and then it shed itself while I was writing my final.

But even the greens, which I can find anywhere, are more varied here. It’s not all dead grass transplanted to branches. Each tree is its own, and there are so many.

When you drive down the hill into Seymour, you approach the hulking Route 8 overpass, its fifty-year-old beams thrusting themselves down through a gray and pissed-off Naugatuck River rapid. Behind it, though, across the river, the hills rise again, all forest. They’re bigger than you, really, bigger than this town – you can see the trees from anywhere. They seem opposed to whatever happens here.

Drive further up Route 8 sometime. Do it at night. When I was looking for the northern lights the other week, I took my friends up that stretch to Waterbury because I knew no one else would be on that road. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen in Connecticut to real nowhereness. Fog rushed down slopes; my headlights were next to useless; trees hemmed in the highway from either side. And it stays that way until you get to the Mixmaster.

The Mixmaster is what they call the interchange in Waterbury between Route 8 and I-84. I learned that today. It’s a violent interchange, rising several stories above downtown. It reminds me of St. Louis, where you drive over the Mississippi to enter from the east and rush to merge on the bridge above the Cardinals stadium.

I thought of killing myself this morning and then looked out at the trees in Seymour through my windshield. I couldn’t push the thought any further. I couldn’t push the thought because the trees weren’t inspiring any reaction in me. They were just that, really, branches and leaves and somewhere roots, and I felt no awe staring out at them.

Then I thought about it a little: Isn’t this when these thoughts are supposed to be at their most dangerous? Isn’t it, like, pretty bad to have latent suicidal thoughts rising up to the surface at a time when the things you find most inspiring don’t inspire you at all? What keeps you here, then?

I’m not sure, but I went to Dunkin’ and drank a coffee and ate a sandwich and went back to work.

You know the song “Floating in the Forth” by Frightened Rabbit? I don’t know anything about that band outside of that song. Scott Hutchison imagined his death in those lyrics exactly as it later ended up actually happening.

The Firth of Forth – referenced in the title – is where they found Hutchison’s body, washed up on the banks, in 2018. It had been ten years since that song came out –

Am I ready to leap, is there peace beneath
The roar of the Forth road bridge?
On the northern side there’s a Fife of mine
And a boat in the port for me

The Genius annotation on this lyric says that the “boat” is probably a literal reference to a rescue vehicle sent out to retrieve his corpse, but I don’t agree. I’ve always heard hope in those last two lines: I think Hutchison drags himself back to life when he imagines the northern banks of the Forth, and the boat welcomes him when he arrives.

I think his words aren’t capable of committing to the bit when it comes to imagining death, even if his actions later did. The first and second halves of that lyric excerpt clash with each other and make no sense in a strict narrative sense. He wants to accept death, but he can’t, because there’s nothing left to say after that and he still needs to write more lines to round out the verse.

The first and second choruses each end with a warding off of death – first, “I think I’ll save suicide for another day,” which gets swapped to “another year” at the end of the song. It’s one of the most visceral imaginings of suicide I’ve ever heard in a song, furthered by the fact that its events actually went on to happen, and it swings back to life in nearly every stanza.

Woods of Ypres’ final album – released weeks after vocalist/guitarist/lyricist/drummer David Gold’s death – ends on a similar note. The track “Alternate Ending” describes pretty well the actual manner of his death:

In the darkness, under the stars
With enough warning to pull off to the side in time
[...]
Back on the highway, under the moon
My final moments, still wondering about you

Details on his death are a bit scarce, but my vague recollection from ten-year-old news articles is that he was struck by a vehicle on an Ontario highway late at night while walking near the shoulder. You can take this track as either prescription or prediction, too – I’m not going to speculate too much on it, since his death may or may not have actually been a suicide, and it’s not really my business.¹ The point I want to make here is –

Regardless of how you listen, it’s hard to hear the last three songs on this album (“Kiss My Ashes Goodbye,” “Finality,” and “Alternate Ending”) as anything but this same sort of pendulum-swinging between death and life. “Kiss My Ashes” starts as one of the most energetic tracks on the album, with straight-trotting eighth note power chords and a measured, even vocal cadence that the other high-energy tracks don’t have (“Career Suicide (Is Not Real Suicide)” and “Adora Vivos,” the other two energy peaks in the album, both feel much more frantic, like they’re actively fighting against the metronome).

Gold’s voice soars on the words “We cry for our life together because we know it will end / And we try to understand how we could ever love again,” but he mostly sticks to one pitch per syllable, which is a bit of a rarity for him (not a dig; he was just one of the foremost practitioners of sliding-down-half-a-step-at-every-conceivable-opportunity that I’ve ever heard).

Then, the track collapses in the second half, turning into a plodding, doomy demand to be forgotten after death (sorry). It goes on like that, and then “Finality” arrives, in which the singer asks if he can still miss someone after his own death. It could be the last track on the album and it would remain just as eerie – the final “I will wait forever / I wait” is haunting – but it doesn’t end there.

“Alternate Ending,” for all its factual description of Gold’s own death, doesn’t end with that. It ends, like “Floating in the Forth,” with an imagining of life:

Holding on to a dream
When the end couldn’t come slow enough for me
Holding on, holding on
Holding on, holding on
Holding on

There’s an important distinction to be drawn here between this song and “Floating,” which is that I think this song still ends with its narrator dying – but there’s some ambiguity, and, even in this moment of imagined death, there’s also an imagined future, another version of events that exists in some tangible way.

No one really wants to die, I think. “Floating in the Forth” speaks from a narrator who can’t commit to drowning himself in the body of water he loves – and “Alternate Ending” has a narrator who, I think, does die, but his imagination doesn’t end with that death, and it, too, swings back to life.

To come back to what I was saying earlier – I can’t die now because the trees weren’t beautiful today. There’s no romance in the river to me right now, and the forests are not some forgotten home that my decaying body cries out to return to, to find a way to die in – they’re just wood. What kind of death would that be? What vindication would I get?

When I do see beauty in the trees, I don’t feel the immediate need to die there. I tell myself that when I’ve really hit a low point, I’ll drive somewhere far out there, and that’ll be it. I always wanted to die in nature.

This is something of a low point, I think. But I don’t have any desire to go out and do it. Another day, maybe.

I don’t know what the future holds, beyond the fact that the pendulum will keep swinging, and, if I ever write any more songs about suicide, they’ll probably have happy and living endings, just like every other song about suicide that’s ever been written.

I feel like I need to say something incredibly corny now and end on some hopeful note. But this is my silly little Neocities blog and I make the rules. So all I’m comfortable saying is: the pendulum swings, and that’s not the worst thing in the world.

-

^{1. Also, I’d be remiss not to mention that his surviving family members have consistently stated that his death wasn’t a suicide. I don’t mean to draw too much of a parallel between Gold and Hutchison – the songs I’m discussing simply resonate with me in similar ways as entities unto themselves, divorced from their creators.}