Topic Edit: Tears in America (15)

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<strong>Attempting suicide by drinking pesticide</strong>

I must have been around the sixth grade. One afternoon, I bought a bottle of pesticide from some stall in the market, carried it home, stepped into my room, and—armed with a child’s strange and absolute resolve—drank it down.

What thought could have led me to such an act, I can no longer retrieve. Memory refuses to yield the precise emotion. Perhaps life already felt unbearably heavy, and the future seemed like a long corridor without light. Perhaps, in the narrow consciousness of a child, despair arrived not as a concept but as an impulse—sudden, unreasoned, and absolute.

Looking back, it astonishes me that I dared to approach death at an age when I could not possibly understand its weight. It is almost comical, almost tragic, how a child can mistake the idea of death for a kind of escape, unaware that escape itself is a notion that requires maturity to even comprehend.

Whatever the reason, that day I found myself standing at the threshold of death for the second time in my young life. Yet as my stomach twisted in violent pain, something ancient and instinctive awakened within me—a raw, wordless insistence on living.

My earlier resolve dissolved instantly. In its place rose a will that felt older than I was, as if life itself were refusing to release me. I screamed for help. Someone in the landlord’s family understood and ran to tell my parents, who were working at the shop in front of the house.
An ambulance came. At the hospital they pumped my stomach, and by that narrow margin I remained in the world.
I was discharged the next day, but for nearly a week I could not swallow even water without vomiting. My body rejected everything, as if reminding me how close I had come to abandoning it.

My father, seeing me in that state, reacted with anger. He insisted I must have done such a foolish thing out of resentment toward him. But that was never the reason. If anything, it was disappointment in a life that felt hopeless. Yet my father interpreted it as a personal accusation, as if my act were a mirror held up to his failures.

Perhaps that is the tragedy of families: we often misread each other’s suffering as judgment.
Fortunately, the emotional scar did not linger. Life was too demanding, too relentless, to allow us the luxury of dwelling on misfortune. Survival consumed all available space.

And so, aside from me, no one in my family remembers this episode now. It has become a private memory—one of those strange, silent moments when a life brushes against the void and then continues, as if nothing had happened, leaving only a faint question behind: Why did I stay?

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