A Skunk's Will to Live (TW: Suicide)

I was 15 when I locked the bathroom door behind me at my then-boyfriend's house and stared at myself in the mirror with an empty expression.

Like many, I hated the sight of myself. I hated the sight of my self-cut shag and mascara smeared under my eyes from day-long wear. Luckily for me, hate and love are two sides of the same coin.

I fought back tears as I looked to the right of my reflection and spotted the medicine cabinet. I didn't hesitate long before I looked inside. To no surprise, considering my boyfriend was of an immigrant family, all the bottles were in Spanish. I almost felt comforted by the idea that I couldn't read what they said as my Spanish was (and still is) so limited. It was a gamble. I could down a bottle now and not know if it would kill me or not. Somehow, I knew it wouldn't. 

On the daily, we cross paths with many animals--especially birds who fly and squirrels who climb trees faster than a sneeze. Sometimes I wonder what drives them to live. What is a bird's will to live? A squirrel's? Do they really care about their lives or is it pure instinct at work--similarly to how AI is programmed? You could ask the same questions for just about anything non-human, but none could strike more ponderance in me than one animal in particular, and by the title you'd have guessed that to be the skunk.

You'll scarcely hear of someone's favorite animal being a skunk. You can almost always smell one before you see it, and every species that has had the pleasure of experiencing its stench knows to steer clear. They're elusive by nature. Rarely do they travel far from home, and rarely do they interact with other species let alone their own kind. Solitary, smelly, and spirited. Skunks love to dig like it's a game and they love to snack on particularly crunchy insects--a delicacy. They most certainly help with pest control (yay for us!) and yet we'd still sooner accept a possum over a skunk living on our streets and under our houses. 

A skunk, however, doesn't care about your pest control. It doesn't care about companionship unless to stay warm in harsh winters. Almost nihilistic, they seem like opportunists that only live for themselves--and for what purpose? What does opportunity matter without a sense of purpose? The way we people translate belonging is through each other, and because of that it can be challenging to grasp this simple fact: A Skunk lives only because it feels like it. It sprays when it's scared or even just as a warning because it wants to live. It doesn't give a shit about your nihilisms, existentialisms, or any other isms. It simply lives and it lives simply. 

I think you know where I'm going with this.

I sometimes think back on my suicide attempt as ridiculous. A slap in the face to those who really feel the desire to unalive themselves. However, like a skunk sprays to communicate its desire to live, I downed a bottle of pills to communicate my sense of loss. A loss of self to all of my abuses and self-pities.

As a 15 year old lacking emotional intelligence, I never verbalized my sense of loss of self. Perhaps I feared that people would think I was just being needy. I have only told a few, until now, about my suicide attempt out of fear that many would have thought that, since I knew I wouldn't die, I was only doing it for the attention. 

I now would not deny that fact. I did do it for the attention. I did it because I saw no other way, at the time, to communicate my despair and loneliness without human validation. I knew. I knew.

I mean, could the unknown pills have killed me? Yes, and a skunk might still die even after spraying its predator. The desire for life would have been evident in the lingering stench of a skunk's spray, just as it would have been in the untranslated bottle of what might not have been simple painkillers.

My then-boyfriend eventually came to check on me. I let him in the bathroom with tears rolling down my cheeks and he coerced me, in a panic, to gag until I vomited whatever I had ingested. We were still unsure, even after he translated the bottle for me, of what would happen to me in the case that I didn't expel all of what I had swallowed, but even so I knew. I hadn't the heart to tell him I knew. I hadn't the heart to admit to myself that I knew. I was a skunk, and I wanted to live.

Even now, I think of the simplicity of life in other species. I think of how easy it is to enjoy a dance in the sky as a bird or to enjoy a game of chase as a bushy-tailed squirrel. It's when I stop and consider the skunk and its need for nobody, however, and I decide to live within myself.  Others will join me when the time is right.  We'll know we could benefit from each other's warmth and willingly tolerate the stink.

"He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found."

                                                                     - Franz Kafka 

 Song listened to: Reverie, L. 68 (Arr. Badzura) by Claude Debussy