Nick Flynn
About this time last year (late April 2019) in the New York Times (Sunday Review section) a psychiatrist wrote a compelling piece about suicide. One of her main points was that suicides often occur on impulse and one thing people can do to protect themselves and others is to not have the means easily at hand, whether that’s a gun or pills. The deaths by suicide of prominent people who from a distance seem to have everything to live for puzzles us. Yet in a dark moment death can somehow make sense to them. Apparently, the poet here understands how that can be and makes reference to the death of film star Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment, a box filled with enough Vicodin to kill me. I would have sworn that I'd thrown it away years earlier, but apparently not. I stared at the white pills blankly for a long while, I even took a picture of them, before (finally, definitely) throwing them away. I'd been sober (again) for some years when I found that box, but every addict has one— a little box, metaphorical or actual— hidden away. Before I flushed them I held them in my palm, marveling that at some point in the not-so-distant past it seemed a good idea to keep a stash of pills on hand. For an emergency, I told myself. What kind of emergency? What if I needed a root canal on a Sunday night? This little box would see me through until the dentist showed up for work the next morning. Half my brain told me that, while the other half knew that looking into that box was akin to seeing a photograph of myself standing on the edge of a bridge, a bridge in the familiar dark neighborhood of my mind, that comfortable place where I could somehow believe that fuck it was an adequate response to life.
Nick Flynn, "Philip Seymour Hoffman" from My Feelings. Copyright © 2015 by Nick Flynn
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