Excerpt: Salem Avenue

After work I spent about an hour on my bed, lying, staring at the ceiling fan and trying to count how many times it spun around. Eventually though, with a lack of anything better to do, I decided to go to that suicide support group. It was filled with a bunch of crying people, all of them holding hands and sharing stories about how miserable they had felt because their loved ones had committed suicide and how they hoped that they were at peace in heaven, etc. etc. etc. They then asked me to share my story because they had never seen me before.
I told them everything that I already knew. She jumped off an elevated train platform. She hated life. She loved me and didn’t want me to feel hurt. She was such a good, kind, sweet, loving person. She deserved to live. I sugarcoated it a lot, but apparently it was good enough, and again everyone supported me, these robots of compassion. After the meeting, someone came up to me and said, “I know someone who jumped at Salem Avenue too.”
I turned around. She was young, with no other real distinguishing features. She went on to say, “He was my lover. For days after that, I couldn’t feel any emotion and then I came here and all the bad feelings went away.” She also told me I was lucky because my wife sounded like such a nice person. She then asked me where we went on our honeymoon, a question that stopped me in my tracks. I told her our destination: Las Vegas, a place where we could pretend to be sinful for a week, but instead ending up losing money in casinos and eating extremely crappy food.
“I was going to go with my boyfriend to Aruba. We had enough money and we had a date set and everything, but then our plans got stalled because he killed himself. It was such a sad thing really.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it was.”
“By the way, my name’s Sylvia. We should meet sometime. You seem like a good enough person.” She then gave me a piece of torn up loose leaf paper and then left. I then thought about Aruba: it sounded like such a nice place, but laden with disaster.