24 December

TW: Suicide


On the 24th of December, a man died. To be precise, he killed himself. I don’t know the details. His age, the circumstances that led him to do it, whether he knew he would die that day when he woke up in the morning. All I know is that a train was involved.

A train that had come to a halt somewhere between Panadura and Moratuwa, closer to Panadura, where I was headed after a long, long day.

I was in a three-wheeler and was headed home after lunch with a friend. It was a day of endings for many people, I think, this man and myself included. But for me, it was just a feeling. For him, it was whatever happens to the human body when hit and run over by a train.

I was exhausted. The previous day had been spent on my feet, baking. I had Christmas orders to be delivered on the 24th and I went to bed at 4am, only to wake up at 7am. It was around noon by the time the deliveries were done and despite thinking I was done with baking until after Christmas, a few last minute orders had come in for the 25th.

But I decided to get the booster dose that day, thinking the pain would set in the next day. The worst would be missing Christmas lunch but I’d survive that. So arm feeling a bit stiff, the lack of sleep catching up on my, the formation of a thought in my tired and drained brain, all these things led me to nap on my way home.

At some point, the driver woke me up with exciting news. A man had died. Killed himself. Was the body all over the tracks? What was it like? Was it really, really bad? The driver asked people standing outside their homes, watching the crowd gathering near the end of the train.

There was a weird sense of excitement in the air. The kind you’d expect from kids the next day, when they found presents with their name on them under the Christmas tree. There were kids watching, teens, people in their 40s, old women who couldn’t stand straight.

They weren’t shocked or sad. They were excited.

I couldn’t speak. The only other time I had been so close to death of this kind was when I was in my mid-teens. We were on our way back from school, only three or four students left in the van. Then too, we were on the New Galle Road, somewhere between Panadura and Moratuwa. A lorry was slightly ahead of us, on the other lane. A man ran up a small road and lay on the road. The lorry came to a sudden stop, just in time. The man indicated with his hand that the lorry should run over him.

A few men ran over and pulled the man off the road. The lorry started moving forward and the man ran on to the road again. The driver once again stopped the vehicle. The men were able to keep the man away from the road until the lorry and our school van drove past. I don’t know if this man succeeded that day or if he lived for a couple more years. I don’t know if he’s still alive. Maybe he is.

But sometimes this memory comes back to me. In flashes. It still bothers me. Makes me feel sick. Unsettled.

The Christmas eve incident makes me feel the same way. I think I only told one person about it. But I don’t know what affects me the most: the fact that a man died that day, the excitement people felt about it or how I felt more about this stranger’s death than I did about my life and people I was supposed to care about.

For someone who talks about her feelings quite a lot online, I don’t know why I have trouble with this one thing. And as unfair as it may be to the people concerned, I do need to try and get this off my chest.

See, that day, from the very beginning, I knew something was wrong. Something was going to happen. I didn’t know what but I knew something would.

Later that day I realised that someone who I thought made me happy wasn’t making me happy. I later realised that I was being too hard on myself, putting so much pressure on myself to feel the right things and say and do what I thought the world expected from me. So I convinced myself that I was happy.

The newness of friendship, the excitement, all this made me happy…

Well, on the 24th of December, I realised that none of them did. But I wasn’t ready to accept it, so I decided that the uneasiness I was feeling was due to tiredness and the booster and just the usual and now this man who killed himself.

Anyway, I didn’t have to do this for long because a few days later, said friendship came to an end. And it was all very underwhelming.

I forced myself to care. To feel something. But I couldn’t. And I still can’t. I feel indifferent about the whole thing. Like being told the restaurant doesn’t have the beef dish when I had no intention of ordering it.

And this scares me. It makes me feel like I’m not alive. Like I’m losing my ability to be human. Like I’m forgetting how to exist in this world. It’s like noticing a scab on your leg or arm and wondering when you hurt yourself and why you didn’t even feel it.

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