On Space and Suicide

When I was in Colorado, a young man in a dorm room shot himself in the head.  My routine contemplation about death was further charged and the event incited a morning research session on suicide rates.  Upon first glance, I recognized a pattern. 

A person living in the United States is more likely to kill themselves in Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, and Nevada.

These states have a lot of open space. 

The lowest rates from the bottom up are New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois.

These are densely populated.

Now I have not investigated these numbers further, and am not considering the infinite variables (including weather and wealth) affecting this observed pattern, but it inspired wonderings.

I began thinking about how we relate to one another.  In the city where I'm writing, in a crowded cookie store, snuggled into the state with the lowest suicide rate, people often feel lonely.  That's what is said anyhow.  I often feel lonely.

But maybe there is something to be said about the effect of physical closeness.  Maybe, even though I don't know the woman across from me in this thronged bakery, the one with delicate fingers and an apparent affinity for felines - evidenced by her pussycat purse, the siamese beauties decorating her coat sleeve, the picture of wrestling lion cubs taped to her book and the loving scratches on her left hand - maybe just being near her is enough to connect me with something that hushes the maddening voices which might encourage terminal self destruction.

Or maybe death is just so private we can't do it with too many people around.  I don't know.  I've never wanted to kill myself, but thinking about it warms my relationship to these eight million neighbors.

Now, when I ride the train, when I jog through Brooklyn - once pretending the sidewalk people were more like moving trees than anything else - I'm plugged into my music, laying a sweet foundation over abrasive noises.  Now, as I move through this dense metropolis, I am in turn moved by the millions around me.  More than trees or obstacles or attractive woodsy-looking men, the fellow human inhabitants that make rainbow city what it is, are also medicine.  For me, and maybe for each other. 

A fantastically unavoidable afterthought wanders into my awareness:  If they are all medicine to me, then I am medicine to them.  I am important, I am part of something bigger than my secluded musical universe.  In this city, that which is public and private become blurred.  On practical, conscious levels, space is made private through the use of personal electronics, doors, sunglasses, metal fences, taxis, heavy locks, sheet rock, yoga mats, passwords, etc...

Hours later I sit at my kitchen table, waxing philosophical on space and suicide, and listen to a harsh wind whip at the windows.  I'm glad to be protected in here, away from that mysterious un-human wildness.  It is the nature I crave after too much time submerged in the collective.  The vast open space that offers silence and inspiration, where I am charged by and vulnerable to the elements.  But too much time out there and I can't help but feel separate.

So I return to Stephan, the smoking troll man who lives beneath me shuffling about perhaps pantless as he was when we first met.  I'm glad that even in a room I call my own, we share proximity.  I'm comforted knowing that somewhere nearby is a woman with cat scratches on her hands knitting a warming article for a grand-niece and talking pleasantly to purring roommates. 

Being close to them reminds me of ever present sharing, the kind that, when a person might feel like offing themselves, could be just the right medicine for the illusion of separation.  If our minds don't know it, our bodies might take comfort in the physiology of proximity.