I stepped outside with my dog and began to put her coat and leash on one freezing Saturday morning. My downstairs neighbor was nestled in a broken-down grey Hyundai Elantra, attempting to fix it for the umpteenth time. Exhaust fumes pumped out from the rear and filled the air, and I said with a bit of a chuckle under my breath, “You know, it would be really funny if he was trying to kill me with all these fumes.”
Then, almost with perfect timing, his car kind of sputtered and spit out more fumes. My dog moved away from the tailpipe, but I stayed in my mind and started coughing, thinking, “Hmm, honestly, if this car were more perfectly placed—like IN the garage and not out here—this would be good enough to knock us both out. Quite frankly, this fossil fuel I’m ingesting is impressive. I could literally feel myself slowly going here. Wow.”
The more the fumes filled the air—like a smoke machine bought for a kid’s sweet sixteen in the late ’80s—the more I envisioned these weird scenarios in my head with this death trap of a car.
..Like really, if my neighbor wanted to… he could SAW this entire thing. Like…
————
I'm trapped in this little boxed room with a little TV set cleverly placed in said boxed room, which is filling with noxious gases because, of course, the damn fucking car is there.
I go to the car and see the keys aren’t there. And it won’t turn off! All the while, this dark, dank-ass room is filling up with gas, and it smells rank as shit. I turn around, and through the smoke I see some janky, large-ass clown shoes, and I begin to shake in fear. Suddenly, the TV turns on and he shows up with a silly Jigsaw mask and his hoodie on, smoking his blunt:
“I want to play a game.”
I’m panicked and annoyed.
“You see my car? It’s on, and the air is filling with the exhaust. Alright, over there—you see that? It’s a knife. And to the left of it? It’s a dead clown, and in his stomach there’s a key to turn off the car. You got about a minute… if you don’t get it, the room will fill with exhaust fumes and you’ll die for real. But if you get it—congrats! The car turns off, you live to see another day, and I may just save you some of this blunt...”
As he takes another puff, I freak out and panic, coughing frantically, because I realize the room has no doors and no windows, and I’m stuck with a bloated dead clown. My phobia really starts setting in—hard.
“Um, how well did you plan this, my guy? I mean, truly—how well did you think this through?”
He blows out smoke and kind of Suspicious Fry.gif’s me, looks around, and says,
“I think pretty fucking well, if I do say so myself. Let’s begin our game.”
My eyes begin to dart around frantically as beads of sweat flow from my brow to my cheeks.
“NO! NOOOoo HOo—HOw do I get out of the roo—YOU ASS—THERE ARE NO DOORS HERE!!!”
And that’s when he would just drop everything, unmask, and de-blunt.
“What? cough… ahhh, shiiitt… I only figured it up to the dead clown part. My fault—hold on...”
And then the minute is up because like—one, he would forget to stop the game and take too long to figure out how to get me out, and two, I have the gusto to open up a dead body, but a CLOWN? A CLOWNNN? NO! NOO-UH!
———-
I began to laugh and felt a little dizzy. Still in the fog, my dog stared at me from a distance, wondering if I truly had a death wish by how close I was standing to the tailpipe of the Hyundai—and at this point, so did my neighbor, who had been trying to get my attention by knocking on the glass and waving his hand in a “WTF” manner.
As I slowly took in the full scope of the ambience, I realized the outside of the house had kind of disappeared into fumes, and only we and the car existed. And in this situation, the fog would be kind of like an “ohhh, mysterious, kind of cool, kind of romantic” type of setting—for a novel, a movie, a Lifetime special—but no, not here. This was puhretty bad. I was sucking in this air for a while, straight from the pipe like I was begging for the sweet release of death or something...
And maybe I was. I don’t know.
I’ve struggled with suicidal ideations most of my life, since childhood. And although many of my ideations are more along the lines of “Help me, I want to hang from the door,” or “Anna Karenina, NOW,” standing near a tailpipe and comedically thinking of ways to end it definitely pales in comparison to wanting to stand along the edge of the tracks and throw myself in front of whatever train, making some poor unfortunate soul late to whatever appointment they had.
That desire, that burn, that ache... was painful. And sometimes still can be.
However, those little comedic thoughts—albeit a definite sign that I am exhausted (no pun intended) of being on this timeline—are so much more welcome than what I would see for so long in my life before.
It’s more digestible.
Maybe not as digestible as fossil fuel, but hey—some of us will take even the smallest tastes of death in whatever way we can get it.
But now I live out of spite.
I live in spite of death.
In spite of me.
