by Julián Esteban Torres López

The last time I considered suicide, I massaged my knuckles on an airplane destined for the Canadian West. The ice rink of clouds below was convincingly soft, as if it could cushion the fall of a fugitive comet. I was not even a stride into my 30s, and I wondered how many punches it would take for my fists to break through the three panes of acrylic materials that made up the cabin window to my left. I doubted I’d have enough room for a proper bare-knuckle boxing wind-up and questioned if I’d be restrained by my older row-mates or bilingual flight attendants before I cracked the last pane.

I also reconsidered my weapon of choice. Would it not be easier to simply open one of the emergency exits? I mean, they even come with an instruction manual! I responded to myself, Nothing has ever come easy for you, why stop now? I rolled my eyes in jest. Always so dramatic, Julián. I cracked my knuckles as if to say, You’re next. As I went to squeeze the fingers of my other hand, I caught a 5-year-old wearing a gold crucifix around his skinny neck glare down at me as he stood on the seat in front. Though his right cheek was smudged with chocolate, his facial expression was blank. Maybe he’s mirroring how I feel. I forced a smile, but the muscles of his face remained relaxed. Maybe children can detect insincerity better than adults. His stare simply pierced through me, as if trying to see if someone had written his name with Crayola on my head rest and he wanted to guess the color. 

His snoring parents, fast asleep with masks over their eyes, annoyed me. Why couldn’t they restrain the boy? He’s making me uncomfortable. I don’t like being watched, especially by creepy children who don’t smile. This kind of experience is why I don’t want to have children. Adults I can deal with, I understand. But kids, kids are not fully human, not developed, and I don’t know how to take care of small animals. He glanced down at my hands. Did he mistake my knuckle cracking for praying to Jesus? 

For some reason, this bothered me. I fantasized about shoving him into his seat, wiping his face with my sleeve, and buckling him down. I didn’t want anyone, not even this little blond, blue-eyed child, to mistake me for a religious zealot or some terrorist trying to take down a plane for the sake of some imaginary being in the sky. I feared passengers would probably confuse my last words—me calling out to my mother, “Amá,” during my attempt to skydive—as “Allah.” I didn’t want that to be last thing anyone thought of me, and I was glad I’d shaved earlier that morning, even if it was with one of those cheap hotel razors and soap and water. A couple of cuts on my neck had finally healed by the time I’d boarded the plane.

I inherited enough DNA traits from my Mediterranean ancestors to fit a post-9/11 Hollywood caricature of a potential security threat, especially when I’m bearded. My eyes are deep-set, prominent, and almond-shaped. My gaze is full, intense, and severe. My brow is well-marked and expressive. My hair is dark, thick, and unruly, and, at the time, shoulder length, but which I wore in a bun or hid under a beanie … a toque, as I’d grown accustomed to calling it while in Canada for graduate school. On that day, I wore the toque. It was colorful, striped with the shades of autumn—my favorite season. My complexion: honey almond. Almost the exact opposite traits of the Aryan race poster boy who stared at me without blinking, as if trying to decipher if I could be one of those strangers who could be trusted since I wasn’t offering him any candy. However, I’m sure a sketch of me would set off alarms for border patrol officers trained to place people into certain groups based on physical features and skin tones. I’ve been selected for “random” secondary security screening so often I now expect it. At the dismay of anyone traveling with me, I work it into my schedule when I prepare to arrive early at the airport to not miss my flight. “Why do we have to go so early?” they ask. Not wanting to get into an entire racial profiling sermon, I simply notch it up as a quirk. That day, however, I travelled alone, carrying only a green and white The North Face backpack that mapped out the topographical elevations of a nameless mountain range and a book to accompany me. Most likely something by García Márquez, or Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky. No, wait, it was Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction. 

“Why don’t I have more books by women authors?” the blond boy overheard me mumble to myself, right before the depressive episode struck.

But there I was, an actual potential security threat, and I got angry that I was consistently stereotyped as such. That may be so, I argued with myself, but it’s different. I don’t want to harm others, just me. This isn’t a religious or political act. This isn’t a performance for some fundamentalist to later evaluate or for some God to judge. It’s a desperate act by someone who sees no future except as a ghost untethered to the realities of the world. A symptom of going off my meds without consulting my psychiatrist because of its side-effects.

On that flight, I saw no positive prospects for myself, no matter how much I tried to envision any. Strapped into my window seat, I ate the trail mix I sneaked into the plane from home, and I enjoyed nothing. Even the raisins were flavorless. I slipped deeper and deeper into a cave, into myself—the bleak and obscure part—and I drowned more intensely in my emotions the darker it got, steeping quietly. 

It felt like the color chestnut and smelled of burned ash.

#

My ribcage became a prison for my heart. Solitary confinement. Inescapable, and I could hardly recognize myself. I remembered having memories of joy and good times. I thought of that moment in the mid-1980s when my father returned home to Medellín from a trip to New York and brought me the first bag of M&M’s I ever ate. The peanut kind. I’d never tasted the combination before, and the experience awoke my taste buds in a way bacon or broccoli just couldn’t. He also brought me a bootleg cassette tape of Michael Jackson’s Thriller that included a couple of tracks not on the original LP. I tried to sign along, even though the only English words I knew at the time were Superman and Hawai’i. These memories, however, were all intellectualized. My mind understood the concept of happiness, but my emotions were numbed, as if amputated. Phantom limbs. 

The experience reminded me of that time in 1994 when my father took me to the hospital because I was having difficulty breathing. That summer, we moved back to Colombia for good, or, at least, that was the plan. I had just completed 7th grade after having spent five years in New Hampshire. It was then, upon my return to Medellín, that my clinical depression began and slowly festered until finally diagnosed in November of 2010 before it overtook me again during the final beats of a relationship soon to flatline. My anxiety: cojoined at depression’s hip.

In that Colombian summer of 1994, I spent two months straight not leaving my room. I simply wallowed while playing John Madden football on my Sega Genesis console and repeatedly watched Demolition Man with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. To this day I smile at the joke in the movie that Arnold Schwarzenegger was to become Governor of California in the future. The film prophesized the event a decade before the Governator actually did end up running the golden state. Eureka!

I remember the exact date of my trip to the hospital because during those two months, HBO advertised a Barbra Streisand special set to premiere on Sunday, August 21st. Earlier that day, I ate a snack in bed while on my back as I watched a commercial for the Streisand concert, which was to debut that evening, and the food must have gone down the wrong pipe or something. I couldn’t breathe well, but enough to stay alive. I couldn’t move without feeling pain nor could I scream for help. I panicked and went into a fear-induced paralysis. I remained in bed for hours simply hoping my mother in the next room would check in on me at some point in the day before I died of asphyxiation, or so I worried. Fortunately, she found me nearing dinner time, and called my dad to come home so he could rush me to the hospital. I didn’t know it then, but this was the first panic that sent me to an emergency room. In later years and in different countries, I would continue to be transported by friends to ERs—after thinking I swallowed a piece of glass at a restaurant, or picked up by an ambulance at work collapsing to the ground without warning after giving my two weeks’ notice.

But on that Sunday, August 21st of 1994, in that Medellín emergency room, the nurse stuck a needle in a vein of my left hand without telling me she was going to do so. I swiped it away, as if stung by a bee. Blood squirted from my hand, but I couldn’t even yell out in pain because I still couldn’t speak. She grabbed my hand again, and this time signaled her intention with her eyes and lips, which is how we Colombians like to point. I looked at her with distrust and felt my fingers turn into a fist. From an early age, it was fight, not flight, that my instincts would choose, which may explain my desire to punch through the airplane window when fear of death arose quite suddenly 17 years later in the summer of 2011 on my way to the Canadian West. But in 1994, on the night of the Streisand concert, in that emergency room, which was more like a lobby with hospital beds, sick people surrounded me, and a drunk man who’d recently been beaten up by some 20-year-olds at a bar fight was dragged in. His injuries and outburst seemed to take precedent over mine. As the drunkard squealed profanities and slurred his name to an attendant with the clipboard trying to take down his name, the nurse connected me to an IV for the first time in my life. The ooze of cold liquid spread at the speed of lava through the spiderweb of tunnels inside me, completely overtaking my body in a way I neither imagined possible nor could control. My body was overcome; conquered by a foreign power. Was this what being possessed by a demon was like? I had recently watched The Exorcist on HBO, and I began to simultaneously wish for and fear an exorcism. But soon, the sadness of missing the Streisand concert absorbed me, and I could no longer concentrate on the voices coming from the white coats and the drunkard, nor the IV.

#

I’d lost myself on that airplane to the Canadian West in 2011, and I no longer felt I mattered enough to go searching for that once lively little Colombian child who sang to his sister and held her hand so she’d fall asleep feeling loved … so she didn’t worry or miss her cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents as much when we took our first flight together in the summer of 1989 to immigrate to the United States. We had just turned eight and a half and five and a half, respectively, and I wished I had crayons in my pocket to give her that day to distract her. 

I felt alone on that plane to the Canadian West in 2011 as I massaged my knuckles, yet I knew there were others who cared for me. If my sister had sat next to me, she would have returned the favor. She would have woken up the parents in front of us so they would take control of their child, and she would have given me a crayon to calm me down. But knowing this didn’t matter at the time because I didn’t matter, and the only way to get rid of the pain and suffering was to sleep it away in a place where I couldn’t even dream. I was paralyzed in despair and inflated with emptiness. I was in a well, yet no longer wanted to climb out. It was easier to die than to rely on hope, and I’m not the praying type. That we’ve confirmed. 

In the summer of 2011, I sat in the airplane in the same way I did on that hospital bed the night of the Streisand concert. The same anxieties returned. I was helpless and could hardly breathe or speak. Paralyzed and possessed by some demon, I stared out the window and tried to avert locking eyes with the five-year-old with chocolate on his face.

And yet, I cared enough to not be remembered in a certain way, and I clung to that emotion, as it gave me a glimpse of something I could control. And though I did not know if it would take an hour, a day, a week, a month, or a year, I had to mutter to myself, This too will pass. This too will pass. This too will pass. Looking back, I picture myself rocking back and forth in that airplane, cracking my knuckles, massaging my hands, counting my fingers, head tucked into the neck of my blue Mosaico hoodie, and eyes mostly closed for hours. Onlookers probably thought I’d fit right in at an insane asylum. Fortunately, most around me were either asleep or entranced by movies on their iPads and other portable devices. I told myself I just needed to survive long enough to be on the ground. I’d deal with my situation then.

I didn’t feel like this when I boarded on the airplane. On the contrary. I looked forward to returning to the Okanagan Valley after visiting my family in Florida and Colombia for the entirety of 2011 after things fell apart with my then fiancée. I was on a Canadian student visa for graduate school since 2008 and felt at ease cradled by the valley, but I chose to return to Colombia to put myself together after my mental health deteriorated completely, whose symptoms helped break the relationship for good.

At the time, the Okanagan Valley in Canada was one of the few places I felt at home, and I was already in a joyful mood after hugging my mother and sister goodbye at the airport. They always raise my spirits, especially their laughter. But for whatever reason, something triggered my clinical depression and anxiety midway on the flight. I panicked, and you could see my heartbeat pulsate on my wrists. With three hours to go before landing, I didn’t know if I was going to make it, and I felt horrible for the life-ending thoughts that ran through my head.

But the urge was hard to smother. I looked around the airplane and saw the faces of the others who’d potentially be collateral damage so I could stop experiencing the excruciating misery of being human. The two young, undergrad yoga practitioners who wore Lululemon attire; the crying babe in the back who rolled his R’s as he cried, much like my sister at that age; the couple that held hands since I first spotted them at the boarding gate. If I went ahead with my fists-of-fury plan, I wanted to ensure I did it when the seatbelt light was on, that damn chocolate-covered kid was strapped in, there was no restroom line-up, and the flight attendants weren’t serving coffee, watered down OJ, or $15 turkey sandwiches. There was no need for me to sacrifice more than myself to extinguish the uncontrollable fire that burned inside. 

I looked around and wondered if there was a way for me to ensure I could block the window right after I was sucked out of the cabin so no one else had to die but me. Something solid, metal, like the food cart may do the trick, but I couldn’t come up with a scenario where I would have enough time to wrestle one away from the tall man with the mustache and Montréal accent, and then hammer my fist through the window. I’d never wanted something so badly, which I found strange, as I’d been afraid of heights and of being sucked to my death ever since I was a small boy.

#

For years, I feared quicksand, toilets, and drains. As a child, after watching a horror movie where the ground opened and swallowed everything in sight, I began holding on to the bathroom doorknob any time I put pants to ankles to defecate. And, after I overheard family members discuss news reports of a child who’d drowned at the bottom of a pool not too long after his intestines were sucked through his asshole, I was not keen on putting my own ass on an actual drain. The grip of my right hand grew stronger that year. The very hand I planned on using to break through the three panes of acrylic materials that made up the cabin window to my left. Come to think of it, that horror movie may have just been an earthquake movie, which, at the time, I mistook for quicksand. Earthquakes were probably the first disasters I grew to fear before I knew death was something worth considering. My introduction to anxiety came through what I’ve come to know intimately as Nightmare Disorder.

My earliest memory is of a dream I had in 1983, before my sister was born, where an earthquake was protagonist. For a period of months when I was two, my family moved from Colombia to the United States. We drove up and down the east coast, between Florida and New York. In the dream, we parked at a rest stop near St. Augustine to eat some bologna and mayo sandwiches my parents stored in a blue cooler. We took out my 4-wheel child-sized buggy from the trunk, and I roamed freely throughout the rest stop. After a short episode of parental neglect, I lost myself in the humidity and searched for shade under a palm tree. In the dream, there were dozens and dozens of little huts with picnic tables inside them. On my buggy, I rode from hut to hut to look for my parents without success. It soon got dark, a thunderstorm hovered above, and an earthquake parted the freshly cut saw grass, which left me trapped inside an unmarked hut. Hungry. I was left parentless, homeless, with only my thoughts, emotions, and fears to accompany me. I don’t remember waking up just like I don’t remember being born, but I do remember being alive. My fear of volcanoes came soon after.

We returned to Colombia from the United States so my sister would be born back home in 1984, just a week after my 3rd birthday. Then, on November 13th, 1985, after being asleep for seven decades, the 17,457-foot tall Nevado del Ruiz erupted in Colombia. The lava melted the mountain’s glaciers, and the mud and landslides that followed sent debris rolling down its slopes at 30 miles per hour. Not even the fastest human who’s ever lived could have outran the oncoming destruction. At the foot of the mountain stood the small town of Armero. From the helicopter that flew above, the homes looked like tombstones. Of the almost 29,000 inhabitants, the government counted 23,000 as casualties—the fourth deadliest volcano eruption in recorded world history. 

I was four when my mother explained the news report on television to me. The helicopter images of the ruin of Armero are ingrained in my mind. I wondered if the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius looked anything like this. I had just watched a television program on the tragedy with my grandfather, after our usual Flintstones and Wild West cowboy shows. The cross on top of the church, the tallest building in Armero, was one of the few things that survived. (The crucifix around the boy’s neck on the plane to the Canadian West must have sparked this memory.) When I asked my mother how far away Armero was, she pointed out the window and said, “Not too far, just over those mountains.” I asked her to show me on a map where we were in relation to the submerged town. I was terrified to see how close we were to the volcano. I was young and had no sense of scale or distance, but on the map a quarter inch felt like a street away instead of 200 kilometers. It was then I began to fear reality more than nightmares. It was then the Aburrá Valley that surrounds Medellín became my fortress, protecting me from the lava of Nevado del Ruiz. The Okanagan Valley became a surrogate comfort blanket while in graduate school in Canada.

#

And there I was, looking down from an airplane in the summer of 2011, watching the sun fall behind the ice rink of clouds below. I saw the summits of several mountains peek through, which, to some, may have looked like hockey goals, to me emerged like tombstones. As I looked out the window, I wondered why I spent so many years fearing death. 

Yet, on that flight, in the pit of a bruised depression growing yellow around the edges, I couldn’t reason myself out of wanting to break through that window. At the time, there would have been no other death more glorious than landing from the skies onto the apex of the Rockies. Mountains have always been the one thing that could ease my anxieties, and I could think of no other place to rest in peace. 

It’s bizarre that when you contemplate suicide you hardly fear anything; yet, until that episode, I’d spent most of my life afraid. And there I sat, counting to infinity on my fingers because counting to ten wasn’t enough to calm me, and I massaged my hands because I’d already cracked all available knuckles that could be cracked, and I continued to mouth to myself, over and over again, skipping like a record, This too will pass. This too will pass. This too will pass ... until we landed inside the glorious embrace of the Okanagan Valley at Kelowna International Airport. And just as I was to step off the plane, that blond child with chocolate on his face and the crucifix around his neck turned around, stopped to look at me, cracked his knuckles, and smiled. 

This scene suspended me … transitioned me into a momentary and hypnotic calm, as if I was being carried on a stretcher from a nightmare into a dream where I could sunbathe on a hammock overlooking the sunsetting horizon from the hills of the Big Island of Hawai’i while drinking a tropical mango and papaya smoothie. If I’d been wearing my heart rate monitor at the time, I know the slow-down of pulses would have recorded the incident for posteriority’s sake … etched on a graph as if to say: This is the exact moment when it, too, passed. A wish fulfilled.

Like the warmth the town of Armero must have felt in 1985 when Nevado del Ruiz erupted … like the cold liquid from the IV snaking through my veins in that Colombian hospital on the night of Streisand’s 1994 televised performance … the boy’s sunrise of a smile reached me, and it probably did more to infuse my hollow shell and to calm my airplane panic of 2011 than breaking a cabin window with my fists 30,000 feet above hockey goals and tombstones ever could. While I nodded back with a delayed grin, a red crayon fell from his jacket pocket unto my foot—cushioning the fall of a fugitive comet—as he walked away toward the comforting embrace of the orchard-filled valley before us.