02 Jan Writing: Live Free.

This story is from an earlier time in our history as a collective. Content warning: it contains themes of suicidality.

When I called her she’d been standing on the guardrail of a bridge, preparing herself to jump.

I didn’t know this. I was en route to a meeting and had a mission for her in mind: to go get the only inflatable dinosaur suit we could find on the eastern seaboard, in Keene New Hampshire, before the costume store closed its doors at 5:00.

You see, the next day was our friend’s 30^th birthday. And this friend was a person who struggled to take up a crumb’s worth of space in the world. She lived off expired peanut butter and owned like one pair of pants that was becoming more hole than pant. She never asked for anything and she certainly had not asked for a party. But when pressed for birthday desires, she’d made a wry offhand comment about hoping to see folks in the collective wearing dinosaur suits. So I’d filed this away and planned to raise her one.

Having called around to every applicable shop that google coughed up, however, I learned that May was not a happening time for costume slingers in Massachusetts. To get the goods we’d have to cross state lines the same way we had for Alyssa’s birthday, when we’d knocked on her door in February and handed her a Roman candle. We’d have to venture to the relatively lawless state of New Hampshire, where you could go helmet-less on motorcycles and where the license plates all commanded you to LIVE FREE OR DIE.

And we’d have to hurry.

I was thinking this was all very funny, and imagining Ruby would too. But Ruby sounded like a ghost on the phone. Her voice took me aback. “Hey…” I said after a minute. “You ok?”

She hesitated. Then she told me she’d been about to kill herself.

I’d lived with Ruby for three years, and she’d struggled with suicidal urges the whole time. She’d described it to me as being there since she was young, death in the corner of her eye. It was, she’d realized as an adult, her mind’s way of coping with living in a body that didn’t fit. But as far as I knew, she’d never made an attempt.

They say your life flashes before your eyes before you die. I’ve learned this happens when your friend’s death is on the table too: their life, as you’ve known it, flashes in front of you, a rapid-fire montage of all the moments you’ve lived with them.

Ruby swimming at the Rock Dam, musing on the beach about always having wanted to live under the water.

Ruby with her dark floor-length coat, the hood pulled over her head, blond hair spilling from under the fur-lined rim, looking like a glam Grim Reaper at 1 AM smoking beneath the stars.

Ruby playing with Murmaid, her feline familiar, the cat who attacked everyone but her, who couldn’t be normal and just bring home dead mice, instead managing to catch bats and even a Luna moth to gift her momma.

And Ruby with the kids, always pushing them to further heights of magic in their play. Ruby filling the house with the swell of her bass. Ruby with her arms around me after a rough day.

What do you say? When someone you love wants to leave this life? When you learn that they were just about to?

I still don’t know what you say, and I don’t remember what I said that day. I went into an altered state myself, and my words came all from my heart and gut, no brain involved in the planning. I just know that my friend was brave, and listened, and in the end she backed away from the ledge.

Then she did the next logical thing there was to do. She got in her truck, with minutes to spare, and gunned it to New Hampshire.

story by Terran