Excerpt: How to Ride a Bike

I opened my cell phone to pull Darren's number off it, and then dialed him from the landline. He picked up on the first ring.
“What's going on?” he asked, nearly breathless.
“Matty's alive.”
“Oh my God,” Darren said, his voice cracking. He then yelled out, presumably to the others in the room, “he's alive!” Turning his attention back to me, he asked, “do they have any idea what in the hell happened?”
I figured that, by now, the guys knew. If cops were in there looking for Matty's medication bottles, they had to have known.
“Are you still at the hotel?” I asked, avoiding the question.
“Yeah, in the lobby,” Darren said. “The cops told us which hospital you're in. So we're gonna come over.”
“Do that,” I said. “I'm still waiting to see him, too.”
“But he's alive?”
“He is.”
“J, the cops – the cops said that he may have tried to off himself. You know that, right?” Darren asked. The worry in his voice was unmistakable.
“Yeh,” I replied. “I guess only Matty will know what really happened, though.”
There was silence for a moment. “I know – we know – it was pills,” Darren said quietly. “Lithium. Something like ten or twenty of them.”
My stomach dropped. Something like ten or twenty? There was a nearly full bottle's worth of pills when I found them last night. How do you accidentally take ten or twenty pills?
You don’t. You don’t accidentally take ten or twenty of anything.
“Just, get over here when you can, okay? I gotta go.” I hung up the phone before I could receive his confirmation. I didn't want to accept the obvious. I couldn't.
What in the hell had my brother been thinking when he made the choice to take those pills?

Throughout the years, suicide has been made into a social phenomenon. It's been glamorized to the point of excess, where the philosophy “die young and beautiful” has become accepted doctrine. I remember, back in college in a lit class, we discussed the beautiful tragedy that is the belief which suicide encompasses.
“Think of Brutus, Caesar's betrayer,” my professor had said. “Think of Sylvia Plath, and Kurt Cobain, and Virginia Woolf. And Van Gogh. And Anne Sexton. Very different people with a striking similarity – the urge to, as Hamlet said, 'shuffle off this mortal coil.' Why, though? What makes intelligent, creative people make this choice?”
A kid had raised his hand and said, almost with a tone of experience in his voice, “No one can hate you when you've proven that you hate yourself even more.”
Those words came back to me now. How much could my brother have possibly been hating himself if he chose to take so much Lithium? And the real question was, why was he honestly taking it in the first place?
I couldn't help but to think of Kurt Cobain – young, brilliant, talented. Had a wife and daughter. Had the whole world directly at his feet, willing to give him whatever he asked for, whenever he wanted it. And yet, in 1994, he put a loaded gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. Why? Because, as people (okay, everyone) have said, he was mentally ill. Perhaps, like my brother, he needed medicinal aid like Lithium. After all, he couldn't escape the torment of his own mind, despite the pleasures which were thrown into his lap in the here and now. No one will ever know the exact thoughts that crossed his mind the second before he pulled the trigger, but here's what I do know: he wasn't doing it to be glamorous. I can't imagine for the life of me that he did it so that thousands of Nirvana fans would think, “well, shit, if Kurt Cobain can off himself, and he had such an awesome life, I should off myself because my life is horse shit in comparison. Thanks for showing me the way, Kurt.” He did it because it became like breathing to him: he had to do it in order to survive. And maybe he didn't survive in the literal sense, but in a sense, he won the battle against his demons. So did Woolf and Plath and even Brutus (a suicide I’d consider much more debatable because of the nature of his crimes.) It wasn't to die young and pretty and heroic. It was to survive, to win the fight against the demons which feasted on their brains.
I walked back over to my chair, and slumped down in it. I leaned over, crossed my arms against my chest, and rocked, back and forth, trying to ignore the absolute terror that was threatening my own mental state. He was in there right now – they were doing something to him, something to get the Lithium out of his body. I didn't know how that worked. I'd never taken too many pills before. Come to think of it, neither had my brother. I knew he was alive, but there was no way he was awake during what was happening. I wrapped my arms tighter around myself and decided not to believe that he was feeling any pain right now whatsoever.
My stomach gurgled. I remembered – I was on my way to go get some food. Jason was still sleeping. I was pissed. That had been less than an hour ago. Amazing how your entire fucking perspective on life can change in the time it takes to listen to an album or drive to the airport.