Chapter 4 midnight

chicken story let me guess.You want to know why I killed myself. You want to know how I didn't die.Why am I missing.Where have I been all these years.But why would I kill myself in the first place, right? no problem.That's what everyone asks.They were all comparing me to themselves.Everyone thinks that there may be some kind of bottom line in life. If you haven’t crossed that bottom line, you won’t think about jumping off a building or swallowing sleeping pills—but if you cross the bottom line, you might do that.Everyone felt that I must have crossed the bottom line.People still think: "Will I go to his step?"

But the truth is, there is no bottom line.Everyone has their own life. If you screw up your life, after screwing up, will there be someone to save you? Or, is the person who can save you waiting for you there? Reminiscing about the past, I try to figure out what happened the day my mother died.That was almost ten years ago.I was not with her when she died.I should be there.So, I lied.This is a bad idea.Such a secret cannot be kept at a funeral.I stood by her gravestone and tried to convince myself that it wasn't my fault that I wasn't there for her in her final moments.That's when my fourteen-year-old daughter took my hand and said softly, "Daddy, I'm sorry you didn't even have a chance to say 'goodbye.'" Her words broke me.I fell to my knees, weeping uncontrollably.The wet grass stained my pants.

After the funeral, I was drunk and passed out on the couch.Life changed.One day can change a lifetime.For me, that day completely crushed me.My life was once shrouded in the influence of my mother—her opinions, her criticism, her suffocating maternal love.There was a time when I secretly wished she would leave me alone. But she did.she died.No visits, no phone calls.Before I knew it, I started letting myself go, like uprooted grass, letting the waves of life push me over the edge. The presence of the mother gives the children a certain illusion of self.One of my hallucinations is: I am quite satisfied with my state, because she is quite satisfied.And as soon as she died, that illusion disappeared.

In fact, I'm not happy with myself at all.I always thought of myself as a promising young athlete, but by then I wasn't young and I wasn't an athlete anymore.I became a middle-aged salesman with no future at all. Almost a year after my mother died, I made one of the worst investment decisions of my life.I put almost all of my savings in that now worthless stock fund.She was quickly "transferred" to the West Coast, leaving me to confront my wife, Catherine, and explain to her where all our money had gone. After that, I drank a lot more—players of my era took a few sips—but it became such a problem that I got fired twice.And the firing added to my drinking.I don't sleep well, eat well, and age rapidly.When I have work, before I meet a client, I have to rush to the bathroom quickly, and use the mouthwash and eye drops I carry with me to cover up my smell of alcohol.Money became an issue; Catherine and I were always fighting over it.After a while, my marriage was over.She's tired of my lethargy, and I have no reason to blame her.One night she found me in the basement lying delirious on the floor.My lip was broken and I was holding a baseball glove in my arms.

Not long after, I left home—or rather, home left me. I can't express in words how much I hate myself. I moved into an apartment.I became stubborn and closed off.I don't hang out with anyone other than drinking buddies.If my mother was still alive, she might have been able to help me, because that's what she was good at, and she might have taken my arm and said, "Okay, Charlie, tell me what's wrong with you?" But she's gone .The thing is, if you don't have your parents, no matter what you do, it's like fighting alone, without the backup that will always be there for you.

Then, one night, in early October, I decided to kill myself. Maybe you will be surprised.Maybe you're thinking, a guy like me who was in the World Series couldn't be reduced to suicide, because at least there was a dream come true.But you are wrong, the joy of dream come true is just a slow and volatile process. That thing can't save you. As strange as this may sound: it was my daughter's wedding that really pushed me off the cliff and killed me completely.She was 22 at the time, with long, straight brown hair and full, sexy lips, just like her mother.The wedding took place in one afternoon and she married a "really wonderful man".

That's all I know, because she's written that much.I only found out about it from a text she sent me a few weeks after the wedding happened. Apparently, with my alcoholism, depression, and all my other shitty behaviors, I'm a huge, embarrassing liability to any family event.So, I only deserve to receive a letter and two photos.In one photo, my daughter and her new husband are standing under a tree, holding hands; in another, the happy young couple are toasting. It was the second photo that knocked me out.It was an extremely vivid snap shot of a moment that will never be recreated: they looked like they were laughing in the middle of a conversation, their glasses tilted slightly.They looked so innocent, so young, so... and it was all over, forever.The photographs mock my absence.you are not there.I don't even know this man who lives with my daughter now.And my ex-wife knew him.Our old friends knew him.you are not there.Once again, I was absent at major family events.This time, my little girl will not take my hand and comfort me; she belongs to someone else.They didn't even ask me.They just notified me.

Signed on the envelope, the daughter used her husband's family name (Maria Lang, not Maria Bennett).There was no address on the envelope (why? Are you afraid I should visit them?) I was so depressed that I lost all hope.My only child denied me access to her life, like locking an iron gate to keep me out.You knock on the door, they can't hear you.If you live in this world and no one cares about you, what's the point of living?If life is meaningless, why not kill yourself? So, I decided to kill myself. There is no particular meaning in doing that, it is more of a reason: so what?