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The day I decided to die, I watched the sun disappear into San Francisco Bay.
As the orange ripples spread across the water, I made my way to a subway station, sat on a blue steel bench, and waited for the train heading east to Oakland. I’d been drinking whiskey mixed with coke all afternoon to get the courage to jump in front of the train, and I was so drunk that my plan seemed within reach. I was 23. Two months earlier, my mother had attempted suicide and I had interrupted her attempt. This experience, compounded by years of depression and addiction, made me want to stop feeling. It’s not that I wanted to die, it’s that I didn’t want to live.
I stood up and walked a few steps to the edge of the platform.
The incoming train screeched. A gust of air blew into my sleeves.
“Excuse me,” said a voice to my right, “but would you mind taking a photo of me?”
I turned to the voice. A wiry woman with pink hair and a titanium lip ring stood a few feet away from me, smiled and offered me her phone. Her nails were painted silver. She couldn’t be older than nineteen.
“I literally just arrived in San Francisco,” she said. “And I’m so happy to be here.”
It didn’t occur to me that I could have said no, that I was busy, that I had to take a train.
I nodded and took her phone.
She jumped up to the blue steel bench where I had been sitting, stood on it, gave a peace sign and grinned.
I took a few pictures. For the next ten seconds my attention was focused on their poses. By the time our interaction was over, the train I wanted to jump in front of had pulled into the station more slowly and I had missed my chance. I could have stayed and waited for another train, but the interruption had just thrown me off enough to make me lose my nerve.
A teenager has died. Now his friends visit his grandma every week for breakfast.
I left the train station and walked uphill until I reached a park. Below me, groups of people gathered on the grass, playing guitars and drinking wine. I sat down, lit a cigarette, and stared at the dark water behind the glittering San Francisco skyline. I pulled out my phone and took a photo of one Huskies backlit silhouette. My hands were shaking so hard that the image was blurry.
It’s been seven years since the day I almost jumped in front of the train, and I know a lot more about suicide now than I did when I was 23.
The process of collecting data and information helped me understand what almost happened to me. The child of a parent who has attempted suicide is almost five times more likely to be suicidal than the child of a parent who has not committed self-harm in the past. People with an alcohol use disorder are up to 120 times more likely to attempt suicide than people who are not addicted to alcohol. About one in four people who commit suicide are drunk. (My mother and I were both drunk during our close conversation.) This means that suicide is often consummated when ideas, opportunities, and the absence of interruptions converge in a single irrevocable moment.
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Today my mother is alive because I found her. Today I’m alive because a pink-haired stranger stopped me for a photo.
I call this woman my “interrupter.” Breakers are everywhere – there’s a man who pulled more than 400 people off the railings of the Nanjing Yangtze Bridge in China. There is a retired police officer who repatriated more than 600 people from the ledges of Tojinbo cliffs in Japan. And then there are the random interrupters – the people who approach disconsolate strangers in subway stations.
Sometimes I wonder if my interrupter saw my suffering rising like steam from my body. But even if the interruption was a coincidence, it saved me that night and gave me a tool that saves me to this day.
As I write this, I am in recovery, sober, and in therapy. The combination of these factors has curbed my suicidal thoughts, but I still have days when my despair threatens to burn like wildfire within me. On these days I go outside and ask strangers if they would like me to photograph them.
I tend to reach out to people who are already in the process of photographing each other – couples, friends, families, people photographing each other Selfies. I also approach people who look sad, lonely and lost in thought. Often I don’t have to say anything: I hold my hands up and bend my right index finger I press my finger like I’m pressing a button on an invisible camera and they hand me their phones, smiling.
To date, no one has turned me down. Thanks to this practice, I have enshrined in my mind a catalog of sweet snapshots: the teenage couple sitting on a bench draped in yellow daisies in a garden in Mendocino, a group of women with purple feather boas around their necks at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, a Pair of redheaded friends sipping iced chai on a wooden bench in a small Northern California town, a man standing in front of a weeping willow tree with his arms outstretched like wings.
I will never see these photos or these people again. And if I did, I probably wouldn’t recognize them – and they wouldn’t remember me either. Our entire relationship lives and dies in the time it takes to photograph. My temporal existence collides with their temporary experience to create a frozen frame that will outlive us all – a piece of visual evidence that says, “We were here, smiling.” Then we go our separate ways – I leave them a tangible memory remember that our paths briefly crossed, even if they forgot about me. And they leave me with a sense of connection that interrupts my hopelessness and makes me feel like being alive matters, just a little.
Sometimes I close my eyes and try to remember the photo I took of my interrupter seven years ago: standing on the blue bench in the subway station, her pink hair sticking out in all directions, as was her wide grin it looked like it would fall off her face. The more time passes, the harder it is for me to remember the look on her face, but what I’m left with is a feeling of sharp, deep gratitude. Maybe one day someone will think that way about me too.
If you or someone you know needs help, call 988, text or chat at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
Billy Lezra is a freelance writer working on a book about intergenerational addiction.
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