Note: Unlike everything else on this blog, the following post is not a work of fiction. I wish it were. Please be aware that it addresses the sensitive topics of depression and suicide. If either of these is a trigger for you, please skip this post. Go have a cupcake instead. Or take a nice long bath. But before you go, I’d like to give you a virtual hug. It’s not much, and it’s probably as awkward as you are imagining, but I want you to have it. Sincerely. For the rest of you, thanks for sticking around. You can have a hug, too.  *** I met the mother of a suicide victim three minutes before…

I was eleven when I realized I wasn’t Jesus. I mean, I wasn’t entirely certain at first. It was more of a probability: 99 percent. No, wait. I didn’t know what probabilities were then. So this is just a guess. This is me looking back and putting a number to a feeling. Maybe more like 90 percent. I wasn’t an idiot in the fourth grade. Nor was I delusional. I was a daydreamer. The kind who might look out the classroom window at a passing cloud and wonder if it could be hiding a spaceship. Hoping it was. Even if that spaceship wasn’t particularly friendly. Like maybe it was on a…

He has a recurring dream of magazines. The first came years ago, before the losses started to add up. In the dream, he is standing in front of an entire wall of magazines. The smell of ink and paper is competing with the redolent, sweet scent of tobacco that distinguishes the other half of the dark, dingy, downtown shop inspired by one he visits in the waking world. The wall of magazines is an infinite playground. Five rows in the lower section, six above, both stretching to the left and the right like an artist’s exercise in perspective drawing. Every inch of the pale, pinewood rack shouts with color and…

Today I am Martin. This is the first time I’ve used it. I thought it might be cool to pronounce it like “Martian,” but every time I said that out loud while practicing in the bathroom (words sound better there), I saw Jacob and David laughing at me and Missy wondering if she should join them. I don’t care so much about Jacob and David. They’re jerks anyway. But Missy would make a terrible jerk. So it’s Martin. Mar. Tin. My father is in the basement again. He’s always in the basement. He calls it the “cellar,” because the walls and floor aren’t finished like the rest of the house.…

His last thought is “Finally.” The black, breathless shroud. An emptiness to end the emptiness. ​An infinite, dreamless sleep. Then, interruption. The IV is a cold finger on his skin. Its slow drip of forgetting ushers him from the black into the gray. Thoughts float like ashes and dissolve like cotton candy. Images flash like lightning and fade like Polaroids peeled too soon. Beginnings. Endings. A lingering embrace. A longer goodbye. There is freckled skin, warm, alive, eager. And then her fading scent on an empty pillow. Hope disappears like an almost-kiss. Drip. The gray is an Escher paradox. Impossible paths leading everywhere and nowhere. At the center of the…

“What if you knew, with certainty, that your love life was behind you. That you would never make love again. No, wait, more than that – that you would never even kiss a woman, or hold her hand. What would you do with that knowledge?” He looked at his friend, the seriousness in her eyes betraying the question as one she had already asked – and answered – herself. “I’d spend the rest of my life trying to prove the uncertainty of certainty,” he said. She didn’t flinch. “Even knowing you would fail? Because you understand the premise, right? It’s not going to change. Ever.” He brushed a cherry blossom…