Letters to the end of the sidewalk I

“Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.Then the almost unnameable lust returns.” Anne Sexton, “Wanting to Die”

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but we’re always dancing on a line. Sometimes it’s a line between understanding what’s going on and seeing what’s going on. Sometimes it’s a line between feeling the death in my breath or the tears in my smile.

The unnameable lust for death is something I share with the poet Anne Sexton, who killed herself around the same time as Sylvia Plath. In a book written by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street, Sexton begins by searching the house for her mother’s suicide note. I went through some unsent letters, a collection I often call Letters to the End of the Sidewalk, and have found several of my own suicide notes, all unfinished.

In every suicide letter, I address several people with random thoughts that only they would understand. Every time I get to you, every time I try to explain to you why I killed myself, I always talk myself in circles. And it never really makes sense.

In one letter I tell you that dying was something that I had to do because I loved you, and that it didn’t matter if that didn’t make sense to you, because I never really made sense to myself or to anyone else. Sometimes I write that I don’t want to suffocate you.



I always told myself that if my suicide note didn’t address everything it needed to, or if I couldn’t find my voice and explain my death properly, then it wasn’t time to go. I always get stuck in the section in which I address you. Mostly because it doesn’t explain anything enough.