V e r i t a s . S o p h i a . I u s t i t i a

A drawing done during a Catholic retreat... had my journal with me and began to doodle... I wonder where all my little sketches done during college and university lectures have gone. Should've saved them.

"I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased." Notes from the Underground (1864),Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The rat has been caught, it's in a trap cage roughly the size of a shoe box. The bait, a piece of cuttlefish as usual. My father is pouring a kettle of boiling water over it in the backyard. Even upstairs in my bedroom I can hear it screaming.

Poor rat.

God speed.

The start of another week. I think I'm getting better. At least I don't wet my pants thinking when I think about school (metaphorically speaking, of course). Therapy has been helping a lot, though I am still a slough when it comes to the "homework" I'm given. Tomorrow I start swimming. Supposedly swimming forces you to breathe correctly and so has a calming effect. I guess a little exercise will do me some good as well. I can't believe how fat I've allowed myself to become, and it's gonna take some guts taking off my shirt at the public pool tomorrow, but what needs to be done needs to be done.

The best, and also the most frustrating, part about this extended leave is this amount of free time I have on my hands. It feels downright awful sometimes, knowing that other people are working while I'm watching TV or having a nap in the afternoon. I get guilty about it, but then, this whole ruckus I'm in now is all because I'd been running a marathon at a sprint for a good six months. I'm forced to take things really slowly now, and everything I do seems to be in slow motion. I move more slowly, read more slowly, allow minutes, hours, days to pass without forcing anything to happen.

I still don't know for sure when or if ever I'm gonna be able to find my old self back; maybe it's for the better that the old me has vanished. Still, I feel lost without him. Powerless. I watched Lars and the Real Girl again today, it's a real gem, brings a smile to my face. Read a bit of Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. Read so slowly that I thought perhaps I was finding the book boring. But every time I started where I stopped before, I found something new and alive in it to keep me glued. It's not a page-turner, well, not yet anyway, but it rewards the patience of its reader I think, and I think that's something I need right now.

Breaking News: There is a rat in the house. It has been spotted in the kitchen by several witnesses yesterday as well as this morning when it frightened a three-year old toddler in the living room. Said toddler was unharmed, but all children will be strictly quarantined in the nursery till the dirty rodent has been exterminated. This writer will NOT venture out of his room until the rat is killed. He will not ask to have visual confirmation of the rat's execution but will depend on his father's sworn word.

The last time a rat was discovered in this house was in the late 1990s when the creature was executed by scalding. The same mode of execution will be used now in order for neighboring vermin to hear the death squeals of its kin and serve as a warning that they will meet the same fate dare they venture near this house.

They call us the selfish ones, we who want to kill ourselves. We leave behind tears and heartache for our families and friends, so they tell us. Before we do anything "rash", we should consider the feelings of those who love us.

There is nothing "rash" in our attempts to end it all. Most of us spend weeks, even months planning the perfect way to die. We think about which buildings to jump off and where. In a suburban neighborhood? Easy access to the twentieth floor, true, but to have little children to have to see the wreckage of human bodies? Sky-scrapers? They don't really have windows that open these days. Smart move, heaven knows how many number-crunchers staring at their Excel spreadsheets in their 5 by 5 ft cubicles would gladly end the mind-numbing tedium of their dead-end jobs...

Poison's a long and painful death... why go through purgatory when you're going straight to hell anyway? Hanging? Drowning? A drug overdose?

Do we want our bodies to be intact enough to be identified? Unzip the body bag, take a quick look, yes, that's our son, or do we want to spare them the trauma, have our bodies so mangled they can only be identified by forensic science or our DNA and dental records?

Selfish. Us. We're selfish for not wanting to live in agony, for not forcing our irredeemably broken hearts to keep beating, selfish for choosing to end the utter misery of being instead of living like zombies so the people who vaguely care for us while we live and will remember us once a year when we die can have their peaceful, guiltless sleep unbroken.