It was a Tuesday when she first found comfort in the contemplation of killing herself.

She had not decided to do it. Deciding seemed like too much of a commitment, and along with hard work, confrontation, watching football on TV and beets, commitment was low on her list of likes.

She was just contemplating it. Gazing at the idea. Slowly. Deliberately. From all angles. Tossing it up in the air. Turning it over in her palm. Poking at it here, there, and everywhere.

Prodding and an eyeful of scrutiny aside, the idea still retained its shape. Eye-catching indeed.

But still there was the pesky commitment issue. And the fact that deciding and committing and actually executing (pun intended, maybe or maybe not) was so dreadfully final.

She was not a fan of final.

Linger. Loiter. Hang around till they have to drag your ass out. These were concepts with which she was intimately familiar and which she could get behind. Final just created problems. It meant making decisions.

The only reason she could even make decision in daily real(ish) life was a quote she once happened to be told by someone several times: "It is best to make a decision that leaves more doors open than all the rest." Basically, make the most minimal, non-committal decision possible and defer the rest for later. Take no risk. Eliminate no possibility - however, fantastically remote.

Of course, this advice was also issued by a person that told her, "You can go anywhere to college, as long as it is Harvard." And thus allowing her her first non-fulfilling phantom decision.

She had spent all the subsequent years trying to sigh and shuffle her way into passive aggressively manipulating everyone else around her into doing the same for all her other decisions, but as of late, her secretary had tired of deciding between Diet Coke and Fresca for her lunchtime beverage.

Highlevel decisions were apparently back in her court. And to a real extent, that made the dark idea fairly attractive.

There was so much stress in everything. In every day. In every moment. In every possibility. Her cheeks filled with warmth at the possibilities of things taking a turn; better or worse; and forcing her from her current state. There was always that. The lingering curiousity. She had always been a sucker for seeing how it turned out - even Vanilla Sky and Lord of the Flies - both of which she had hated. But she had to see them through. She had to know how it would end.

Bowing out now would deprive her of the seeing the ending. It never occurred to her that making such a choice would be taking control of the script and writing the ending herself. But this would have been of little solace either, because she always liked to be surprised. Or at least the possibility of being surprised. Though also taking a keen joy in never actually being surprised by a movie or book. This was the symptom of another deep seated reason for not offing herself: There was a her vanity of self-perceived genius. Bumbling as she might be, and unable to find that precise word at the opportune moment as she always was, she did know she was smart. She told people she was smart. Point of fact, and it was one of the few facts she truly believed, she was so smart she knew to hide the fact that she believed herself to be damn smart, damn smart indeed. Genius unrealized.

A genius would do great things. Or great things would do for a genius. Either way she should see it through, was how the inchoate argument in her head went.

But in the now, which never seemed to pass and which uncannily was always following her and yet hiding just ahead in the corners around which she had yet to turn, there was malaise. Or rather, it was more like unease. The now - like her body, her clothes, her employment, her assumed persona that was meant to make people more comfortable but which fooled no one - was perpertually ill-fitting. It chafed. It bagged. It made her feel like an overstuffed sausage. Or an underdressed tourist - socks pulled up to her knees, fanny pack firmly strapped too tightly around her waist. All in her own life. It was unendingly disorienting to bob in and out of feeling like a stranger in her own life.

The discomfort and the unpredictability were constant. At least she had that going for her.

Oddly, as much as she disliked spoiling endings or missing out on them entirely, she had no qualms with tampering with the events of the body of the script. She had long been sabotaging events in her own life. Actively and often. Of course, she only realized these things after the fact. Ignoring the sweet boy who actually liked her. Pursuing the angry man who tortured her with silence. The irrationality, the masochism, of these things she realized after the fact. Genius as she believed herself to be, in the face of these realizations, she still persisted in making these mistakes, these same manipulations of her life's plot points, over and over and over again.

She had lost friends this way. People had tired of seeing herself throw herself against brick walls of misery and pain in perpetuity. She embraced repeating this plot point instead. Clearly, keeping the wall and its promise of bruises was more important than shelter of friendship.

Maybe she did fancy a dark ending after all.

But she wasn't a fan of the dark either. Or blood. Especially her own.

And she couldn't shake the idea that crawling towards the idea of death was an intoxicating idea because it fulfilled her secret need for martyrdom and to hear unsolicited nice things about herself (which behind her unspoken self perception of genius, were her number 2 and number 3 unpoken secrets). And she just despised the idea of people saying nice things about her without her being there to enjoy them. Of course, at her own wake, she could finally dispense with the need for withering false humility in the face of such compliments. On the other hand, she would be dead. And so really, how much enjoyment could she really derive from the process. She had always said that she wanted a keg party at her funeral (of course assuring the other parties to the conversation that it would be when she was old and grey). What if people respected her wishes? She also hated to miss a good keg party. A corpse keg master would be a definite buzz kill.

And while she could go back and forth all day long with angel/devil debates as to motive for doing the deed, the means and opportunity were something else altogether. The fear of her own blood was a major stumbling block. The seemingly insurmountable inability to jaywalk was another - throwing herself into traffic would just never work. She had a car, but no garage, so CO2 fumes wouldn't be possible. Driving into a tree not a guarantee either - she had bought the damn car precisely because it had 8 airbags. Pills? She didn't think she had any pills that would kill her if she took too many. 50 of her antidepressants might just make her unstoppably convivial. Seemed like it might not make sense to give bottlefuls of such things to depressed people. She would be the unsuccessfully suicidal Smurfette. Advil overdoses seemed unlikely.

And she wouldn't really want to find anyone that way, so she couldn't imagine placing that burden on someone else. Well, maybe someone horrible. But really, what were the chances of Hitler rising from the grave and finding her lifeless corpse. Not so much.