In Continuum.

The Virgin Suicides

Virgin suicide
What was that she cried?
No use in stayin'
On this holocaust ride
She gave me her cherry
She's my virgin suicide...

The concept of death,or rather suicide,reached my thoughts once again.I'm not sure if i touched on that subject before,or rather the incidences that happened around me.I guess for some reason i have this endless fascination and fear about death.I mean,you can always push your chest up,draw down your face and say that you arent afraid of death,that it's nothing more than a natural phenomena that is bound to happen.True,but then again i guess the scariest thing about death,as a friend of mine put it on her blog,is that it just lasts too damn long.

To me,i think the idea of death is scary in the sense that,you dont really know what goes through one's mind right before death.Be it suicide or natural death,it's really hard to know what happens at that split second.Im not talking about wills or suicide letters,but what happens in the head of the person on the verge of it all,visiting Heaven or Hell.Fascination,because it's something that is bound to happen to everybody,but nobody can give a true account of what it is going to be like.It's like the 'face' on the surface of Mars,or the Loch Ness Monster,or a Yeti,or UFOs,the way things arent properly explained and only theorized by people only make such things,fascinating in a dark way.

I was reading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides the other day,and suicide no long seems like such a foolish,selfish and stupid thing to do anymore.You might say that the author made it sound beautiful in a rather sadistic way,but of course that's what all authors aim to do,right?To make the most mundane,normal,or stupid things look fabulously astounding with words.

The story tells about the Lisbon sisters,all five of them killing themseles over the course of a year,with four of them killing themselves together on the same night without apparent reasons.The thing i loved about the book was probably the ambiguous ending to the story.By the end of the book,you go back to square one as to why the girls decided to kill themselves.You wont know why they did whatever they did,but the author left the end rather open-endedly for the readers to have their own interpretations.I have my own interpretations of course,but i find that there's more to what meets the eyes in the book,or rather the way i realised the story.

Speaking of suicides,i have a couple of experiences with that myself.It's not like i self-mutilated myself physically at any points of my life of course,but rather the stories i have heard around me,friends of friends,friends of friends of friends,stuff like that.All of them took upon the road to death,after seeing too many winters in their lives,or too little of them.Most,or all of them,were deemed as stupid or foolish by me back then,when i first heard of their deaths.I mean,i guess i never really thought about the situations they were in at that very moment when the decision was made.It is unlike a murder back then,to me.I mean,i've always taken a strong stand about murders,that though these crimes are heavily condemned,they are in some ways,understandable.But i never understood the motive behind suicides,not to mention condemning such acts.I mean,i never agreed,or tried to understand the deaths brought upon oneself years too early,because of such little things in lives that we saw as mundane,trivial little things.

I remember hearing about this girl over at the forums,this ex-forumer who killed herself by jumping off a building,and she so happened to be from my JC last year.She killed herself for another girl i heard,because she liked her and her love was never returned because of...well,he sexual orientation of course.I went to her Friendster account to check her out then,and remember feeling sorry for her photograph.In the main display photo she had spiked hair,chains around her neck,taken in her bedroom by herself,with the ends of her arms disappearing into the borders of the picture.In her gallery were her older photographs,the ones before she became a 'butch'.One of them had the caption "Prom Night!",and she was in a white top,buttoned up with red stripes.She was with her friends then,and i remember her eyes closed,smiling with her friends all around.In her profile,she talked about how she wanted to go to NUS,what courses she wanted to study,what she hoped to do in life,her career and such.Then you start to wonder,what kind of person would kill herself with such dreams in mind,over a girl who didnt like her because she was,in normal standards,abnormal?

I looked at her picture for a long time,and felt this melancholic surge of emotions draining up and out of me for some reason.I couldnt understand her act,of killing herself,and i didnt try to do so either.Im not sure if it applies for all the people who ever kill themselves,but im sure it does for some.Im still certain that a great population of those people who killed themselves,were in some ways mentally unstable,and was incapable of making the right judgements.But there's this small portion out there,the ones who probably saw the truth in it all,who were sane enough to make decisions,and probably thought it was the best decision.And it probably was,though not publically agreed.

In the book,like i said,the author had a lot of interpretations as to why the girls killed themselves.The way i see it,is that their parents we strict Christians in the book,and devoted their lives educating their daughters on the teachings of God.Also,condemning them on normal teenager things,like dating,kissing,listening to popular music,make ups,stuff like that.Now,my interpretation is that they did it out of a desperation,to get out of the house no matter how drastic the way is going to be.Before they killed themselves,they hinted to the boys in the neighbourhood,who were so fascinated with the Lisbons ever since their birth.They invited them over to their house at night when their parents were asleep,and pretending they wanted to slip away out of town with the boys they waited,and when they finally arrived,killed themselves.One of them choked on carbon monoxide from the car,the other had her head in the oven.The elder sister drugged herself with sleeping pills,while the second sister hung herself from the beam in the basement.

It was as if they were crying out for help,but not calling out for help at all.It was a wake up call of some sort,to tell everybody that they were in this state whereby they havent got any options left.They wanted to live,so bad that they wanted to die.I know,that might not have made any sense,but i guess in a way when they killed themselves,they didnt think about death as being DEATH,but being a path out of their misery.The end of life,the end of the road,probably never occured to the girls as they killed themselves one by one.So under such circumstances,are such suicides still foolish in nature,or are they in the way justifiable?It is such a complicated issue,that perhaps it is the reason why the author never provided any solid explanation to the subject.

But like the leaves of trees at the end of the summer,like the ice lake at the end of the winter,like the old record you used to have but thrown away,like headline news two weeks ago.Like so many temporary,tangible things in our lives,the lives of these girls,the lives of those people who ever killed themselves will be forgotten.Foolish or wise,justified or not,they will all be forgotten as yesterday's news.Did the Lisbon girls prove anything to their community?Did they send out a message,was the message recieved and made aware of?Probably for a while,then forgotten because these girls were deemed as crazy,as psychotic,and at the very moment they decided to take their own lives they were all fucked up individuals.

But they werent,as a matter of fact.They were sane,they made a decision.Death as a way out of their misery was like,taking the bus if your car is out of gas.It's like postponing a date with your friend to Sunday because something came up on Saturday.It's like drinking tea because you ran out of coffee beans.It's a solution,it's a way out.They loved life,they treasured it so much,that they had to let it go,that they seeked death to be let out of thise life imprisonment,literally.

"...The paramedics took Cecilia to Bon Secours Hospital on Kercheval and Maumee. In the emergency room Cecilia watched the attempt to save her life with an errie detachment. Her yellow eyes didnt blink, nor did she flinch when they stuck a needle in her arm. Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under her chin, he said, 'What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.'

And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: 'Obviously, Doctor,' she said, 'you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl...'"

--- "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides