I knew it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d remained in that house another week, month or for the next fifty years. After all the punches and kicks I’d taken and inflicted, I could not return.
I picked at clumps of moss flourishing on the trunk’s damp bark and recalled the day it all became too much for me to bear. I’d been standing motionless in the bathroom as the echo of her grief escaped from behind our closed bedroom door. Her sobbing had become louder and sharper until it pierced my skin and barrelled its way through my veins and up into my head. It felt ready to burst, so I clamped my sweating palms over my ears as if to stop it. But all I heard was the rapid beat of my own wretched heart – a hollow, despicable ticking inside a soulless carcass.
Then it hit me with a force so sudden that I collapsed to the bathroom floor. There is a way out of all of this. I could rid myself of my torment if I accepted my life had run its course and committed suicide.
Immediately, the throbbing in my head had begun to ease.
If I’d forgiven her or she’d forgiven me or if we’d made a Faustian pact to forget everything and everyone that had come between us, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was simply too late; we were irreparable. Stones had been cast and glasshouses lay in shards all around us. Inside I was dead; it was time for my exterior to follow suit.
I’d let out a long breath I wasn’t aware I was holding and left the bathroom. A decision of such magnitude would be perceived as drastic to most, but to the desperate, it was obvious. It would mean I could finally gain control of my life, even if it was only to end it. And now that I understood the sole purpose for living was the planning of my death, I felt my burden rise from my shoulders.
Like her, I had mourned, but silently and for different reasons. I’d wept for what she had done to us all; I’d wept for the future we should have enjoyed together and for the past she had worked so hard to destroy. We had wept together and apart for so long, grieving for contradictory losses. Now she would weep alone.
Over the following months, I wore my supportive husband, stable parent and loyal friend masks convincingly. But, underneath, I remained preoccupied with being the master of my own demise. Searching for the right time, the right place and the right means to my end became an obsession. I mulled over options, from an exhaust fume–filled garage to acquiring a shotgun licence, from leaping off a motorway bridge to tying breeze blocks around my ankles and throwing myself into the Blisworth canal.
But for the sake of the children, first I had to tend to her, as she needed to regain the tools to resume her journey before the wind was knocked out of her sails again. So I took control of the day-to-day nurturing and support of our family until her physical and mental health gradually improved. And as she began to blossom, my decay continued.
There would never be a good time for her to discover her husband had taken his own life. But I knew even at her lowest point, she was stronger than me. Eventually she would rise from my ashes to raise our children to the best of her ability. What she would tell them of my death would be for her to decide. I had loved them dearly, but they weren’t wise enough to see who their father really was or to identify his flaws. I hoped she might keep it that way.
Meanwhile I’d settled on a method, and a location I knew like the back of my hand. A place where one of my darkest secrets lay buried – the woods near to our home.
My plan was simple. I would climb a tree, loop the four metres of rope over the branch and affix a noose around my neck. Then I’d let myself drop and pray the severing of my spinal cord would accelerate the speed of the inevitable. I hoped my life wouldn’t slowly drain away from its stranglehold instead.
It was what I had to do. What I had planned to do. What I had been to the woods many times to do.
Only, when it came to the crunch, the end result was always the same. I couldn’t do it. Five attempts over two weeks had finished with me facing the canopy of trees with the rope in my hand but unable to take that final, fatal step. And, after a time, I’d return home to her as broken as when I’d left.
Now, here I was again.
It wasn’t the act of killing myself I feared, because there was little in the world left to scare or scar me. Nor was it guilt at leaving my children without a father, because I’d already disconnected myself from them without anyone noticing.
What terrified me was the fear of not knowing what lay beyond my life. My best hope was the perpetual nothingness of purgatory. The worst was a continuation of how I was living now, only with flames scorching my heels. I wanted death to remove me from my misery and not replace it with something equally as ghastly.
But how could I be sure it would? There was no guidebook or wise old sage to confirm I wouldn’t be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. So my only escape route was a risk I had become too afraid to take. But was it the only escape route?
‘What if you just walked away?’ The voice came so suddenly and so unexpectedly, I thought it belonged to somebody else. I looked around, but the woods remained empty.
‘Your death doesn’t necessarily have to be as a result of a physical act,’ the voice continued, almost singsong-like. ‘What if you just erased the last thirty-three years and simply disappeared?’
I nodded slowly.
‘You can never be part of the lives of anyone you know again. You’ll have to force yourself not to worry about them or contact them. She’ll assume you’ve had an accident but can’t be found, and then eventually she’ll come to terms with her loss and move on. It’ll be better for all of you in the long run.’
While I couldn’t kill myself, I could do all of that. I wondered why I hadn’t considered it earlier. But when you’re sinking in the depths of depression and think you’ve found an escape route, you stop searching for an alternative.
‘What’s stopping you from going right now? You’ve wasted enough time already.’
Yes, you’re right, I thought. I had already whispered goodbye to every significant person in my life, blowing all but one into the air like dandelion seed heads. So before alarm bells rang, I took a deep breath, released my clenched fists and picked myself up from the tree trunk with a renewed sense of hope.
I placed the rope back in its rightful place and left the woods as a man who no longer existed.
1.15 p.m.
It’s remarkable how much ground you can cover by walking without purpose. With no direction in mind or inner compass to guide me one way or the other, I resolved just to keep moving.