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127
You wait and wait; you begin to suspect that you might not
be the Isolde you thought you were destined to become,
but the only thing you achieve is a mild case of anemia and
an enviable figure because you’re not hungry and don’t eat.
You start to tire of waiting and you think maybe you should
help the situation a bit. It’s not enough to eat little; on the
contrary, in a time when everything edible is toxic to a
lesser or greater degree, nothing improves health more
than not eating. You need to do more to move things along.
But how? A colleague sends me an e-mail:“What helped me
was to go to Iraq when things were so messed up there.”
Something to consider. I make a mental note in my planner
for killing time: Become a war correspondent.
Then, of course, there’s my daughter. She’s both a deterrent
against my wish to disappear and a force driving me toward
it: I’m haunted by the fear of offering her a sad life. Because,
this I know for sure: better a dead mom than a sad, toxic
mom. (But, maybe you won’t be the sad mother you think
you’ll be?)
•
The truth is, the greater part of your day is taken up with
graphic, visual, plastic, full-color fantasies of killing
yourself. You are not convinced by the model that comes to
mind, the suicide prototype from your adolescence: the
image of Sylvia Plath with her head in the oven, her two
lovely children in the next room snacking on the bread and