Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

Five years ago, before I met Jason, I had a depression or whatever you want to call it, and one morning
I felt so dead I called Larry and pleaded bubonic plague. He had seen the clouds accumulating inside me
and told me to phone the doctor; bless him, I did. At first they tried out some of the more fashionable
antidepressants on me. They either nauseated me or made me buzzy and I had to say no to maybe six of
them. There was one, the sixth one - I forget the name - which did this odd thing to me. I took it in the
morning, and around lunch I had this impulse to kill myself. I don't mean to shock here; what I'm saying is
that people talk about killing themselves all the time, and some people give it a go, and I'd always known
that, but this pill, it opened up a door inside me: for the first time ever I actually understood how it felt to
want to kill myself.
The drug wore off quickly, and the next prescription did the trick. After about three months I was my
usual self again, and stopped taking anything.
The point here is that there are certain human behavioral traits that can be talked about, but unless
you've experienced the impulse behind them, they remain theoretical. Most of the time, this is for the best.
After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject.
I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life
knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.
In a similar vein, I think there is the impulse to be violent. When Jason and I fought, I'd be so angry that
my eyeballs scrunched up and I saw black-and-white geometric patterns inside my head, but never, ever,
would I consider hitting him, and Jason was the same way. We spoke about this once during a lunch
down by the ocean - about anger and violence - and he said that no matter how angry he ever became
with me, violence wasn't an option for him; it didn't even occur to him. He confided that there were other
situations where violence was an option for him - obviously, the Delbrook Massacre, but who knows
what else? I suppose I'll go to the grave wondering what they were - but with me? No.
Why am I saying this? Because Jason simply didn't have the suicide impulse, nor do I think he was a
violent guy. So I don't worry that he jumped from a bridge or got killed in some fight.
I should add, that when Jason and I fought, the characters went away. To have dragged our characters
into a fight simply wasn't a possibility, any more than suicide or hitting each other. Our characters were
immune to the badness in the world, a trait that made them slightly holy. As we didn't have children, they
became our children. I worried about them the same way I worry about Barb's kids. I'll be having my
day, walking around the dog run down at Ambleside, say, and then suddenly, pow! my stomach turns to
a pile of bricks, and I nearly collapse with anticipatory grief as I realize the boys could burn themselves or
be kidnapped or be in a car accident. Or I'll be near tears when I think of Froggles alone by himself in an
apartment with nobody to phone, no food in the fridge, maybe drinking some leftover Canadian Club,
wondering why we even bother going on with our lives. Or I worry about Bonnie the Lamb, recently
shorn, lost from the flock, cold and sick with loneliness on the wrong side of a raging river. I probably
don't have to say much more on this subject.
And then there is me, sad little me, living in a dream, staring out the window, never again to find love.
With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of those broken, sad
people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter and Christmas dinner without
feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modern movies because it's so hard to fill
weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, just waiting, for those three drinks a night to
turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying my makeup in the morning, combing my hair, washing
my clothes, but it's not really for anyone. I'm alive, but so what.
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