I didn’t sleep last night. Not out of anxiety or excitement. Just an absence of tiredness that didn’t make sense.
I also didn’t go to the labs. I told myself I’d get up, get dressed, go to the lab. But I didn’t. The idea of movement felt absurd. The kind of effort that belongs to another version of me, one that I couldn’t locate anymore.
Weird.
The guy I know once told me that burning silk releases hydrogen cyanide. And he told me perfect steps about how to burn it slowly and trap the HCN in a glass bottle and when the concentration is enough, how I should inhale it. Like a well explained manual to off oneself.
There was no humor in his voice, no detachment, just the slow seriousness of someone who has thought about it too much.
It’s easy to say it’s just chemistry, that the reaction is impersonal: silk contains nitrogen, fire provides heat, gas forms. But that’s not how it feels when you picture it. It’s quiet, precise, almost deliberate. A fabric meant for softness turned fatal by contact with flame.
A slow, invisible undoing.
I wonder what his reason was behind telling me. It’s not like that I would experiment myself with it. Maybe just to put the thought of it in my head. But then again, thoughts don’t just sit quietly once they’re placed.
Sometimes I think people tell you strange things not because they want you to know them, but because they want to see what happens inside you when you do.
I stayed in bed long enough for the day to pass without having a sense of time. Time doesn’t feel like a line anymore, more like a damp cloth I was stuck inside. Whatever.
I remember once reading that every material has a breaking point. A temperature, a stress limit, a force that makes it yield. Maybe minds have theirs too. Only they don’t always shatter loudly. Sometimes they just quietly stop trying to hold shape.
When the guy told me about the silk, what I really remember is not the method, though the precision stayed with me, but the tone. That calm practiced tone. The kind that makes horror sound like routine. It made me wonder how many times a person has to rehearse despair before it sounds like instruction. It’s strange, the way we talk about death when we are alive.
Still, it stuck with me. Not because I wanted to do it, but because of how possible it sounded. How ordinary the extraordinary can be when explained step by step.
A recipe. A formula.
Maybe that’s what scares me most; not the act, but the normalcy of imagining it.
It’s a strange kind of inheritance — to be given not an object or memory, but an idea you didn’t ask for. I didn’t want it, but I can’t throw it away either. It follows me, not as temptation, but as curiosity.
What kind of mind builds such careful instructions for its own ending?
I’ve been wondering ever since if the world would be less terrifying if everything, even despair, could be mapped.
If every feeling came with a flowchart and a margin of error.
Maybe that’s why people like him do it. Not to act on the plan, but to feel that there is a plan.
And in a way, I understand that.
Because sometimes, the scariest thing isn’t the darkness itself but it’s not knowing where it starts or ends. It’s the vagueness that consumes you, not the act.
I don’t think he was trying to plant the idea of death in my head. I think he was trying to show me the blueprint of control, what it looks like when a person sketches an escape route, not to walk through it, but to know it’s there. To keep it folded, like a map in the pocket, just in case. But that’s the problem with maps. Once you know the route, it doesn’t disappear. Even if you never take it, your mind keeps tracing it during quiet hours, testing where the turns lead, wondering how long the path really is.
But I wonder what a way it would be to go like that! I’ve always believed that life should end with some form of authorship, that the closing line shouldn’t be an accident. The thought isn’t about dying; it’s about control, about the strange pride of being able to decide how something ends when so much else is decided for you. Maybe that’s why ordinary endings feel small. Because they happen without permission. They arrive like weather, unannounced.
There should be something unique, if not grand, in the way we say goodbye. Still, when I picture it, I realize how little mastery there really is. No one ever pulls off an ending the way they imagine. It’s never cinematic, never complete.
To pull off this would be somewhat of an achievement in its own. But then again, with silk, you would go painless. A very close friend of mine used to say that there is no pride in dying if you didn’t feel the dying. That dying should be strenuous. For something to be experienced for the last time.
How do you build something for that?
Maybe you don’t. Maybe the whole point is that you try and fail. You can design endings in your head, shape them like blueprints, but the body has its own stubborn plans. It clings. It resists instruction.
She said that dying should be strenuous, something to feel for the last time. But what if living is strenuous? Would you still go chasing pride? Or would you just want to not feel anything for the last time?
Sometimes I think about the people who couldn’t keep walking and the way we retell their stories. We talk about them as if they mastered the art of exit. People I admire had planned it quite beautifully. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Dalida — they went easily. Maybe life itself was too painful for them. Some have chosen a slightly painful path: Robin Williams, Virginia Woolf. They must have experienced dying. Hanging and drowning should be strenuous.
There is something about being decisive. To have authority.
We spend our lives under a thousand quiet forces: expectation, accident, biology, time. Every choice feels half-borrowed. So, when someone seems to take full command of their story, it looks almost sacred, like an act to show them who is in control.
Sometimes I look in the mirror and see traces of all the versions of me that tried to be decisive. The notes, the plans, the fragments of sentences left open. And I realize how all of them failed, and how that failure has quietly kept me alive.