While walking to the park, I suddenly realized that I needed to buy water to drink with all the pills. I've always had difficulty swallowing pills. I have to wedge each one partway down my throat before gulping some water. Sometimes the pill slips out of position, even after the part with the water, and I have to start over. And here I had thirty-two pills to swallow.

At the supermarket I found that they didn't carry any bottled water (this was long ago, before bottled water became ubiquitous), so I decided to buy the most water-like thing they had, which was apple juice.

In the apple juice section, I spent a long time comparing the prices of the various brands before finally recognizing the pointless absurdity of what I was doing.

I laughed all the way to the checkout line, and I laughed as I paid for the apple juice, and I continued to laugh as I walked through the supermarket parking lot.

2. A Useful Thing to Know

In the park, after swallowing the pills, I laid down to die. I remember looking at the branches above me before closing my eyes. I had no idea how long it would take, but I imagined that I would become sleepy and then fall asleep and then die without knowing I was dying. So my last conscious moment would be one of extreme sleepiness.

The next thing I remember -- this may have five minutes later, or ten, or twenty -- is of standing in the spot where I had just laid, having realized that I didn't want to die, not then or ever.

It's a useful thing to know.

3. Morning Constitutional

The closest hospital was three miles away. Fortunately I was a runner back then, so three miles wasn't far. However, in the two previous weeks I had gained at least ten pounds, mainly by gorging myself on pies and cake. My favorite was Entennmen's Chocolate Fudge Cake, which I would finish in single sitting, eating directly from box. I would often eat two cakes a day.

So the extra weight would be a problem, but the pills were far worse. How long could I run before they made me collapse? I settled in at a modest pace and tried to distract myself by focusing on my breathing.

About halfway to the hospital, I noticed a figure in the distance. As I came closer, I saw that it was a man and that he was walking toward me.

This was a bizarre place for a morning constitutional. I was running along Roosevelt Boulevard, a twelve-lane highway bordered by nothing but trees. Stranger still, the man appeared to be dressed entirely in white: white top, white pants, white shoes.

Also, it seemed that he had no arms.

However, a moment later I saw that he did have arms, and that they were wrapped across his chest, as though he were hugging himself.

This too seemed strange. Of course the entire day seemed strange. It was strange to be running to the hospital because of an aborted suicide attempt. It's difficult to think of anything much stranger.

Except, perhaps, for what came next, which is that I saw that the man was not hugging himself. Or that if he was, it was not by his own volition, because he was wearing a straight jacket.

As I passed him, he smiled the smile of a man enjoying a stroll in the sun.

I waved.

4. Killing Time

On my arrival at the hospital, I discovered that I didn't feel all that wretched, considering. I remember standing across from the emergency room entrance, confused about what to do. I didn't want to enter unless I was certain I needed immediate medical attention. I couldn't bear the thought of sitting in a dreary room with a loud television, waiting to hear my name called. So I decided to remain near the entrance, where I would be seen if I happened to pass out, until I was certain it was time to go in.

There was a phone booth nearby, so to kill time I called a girl I knew, I believe her name was Lori. She was blond and played guitar. We had made out once.

I kept the phone booth door open, just in case. We talked for a while before I finally told her where I was and what I had done. She begged me to go to the emergency room, and I promised I would go as soon as I felt bad enough. However, every few minutes she would ask how I felt, which quickly became tiresome, so I lied and said that I was feeling awful and that it was time. I think she may have cried.

Then I paced back and forth in front of the emergency room entrance, waiting.

5. Consequences

Life is a series of decisions and their consequences. I decided I wanted to die, and then I tried to kill myself, and then I changed my mind about wanting to die, and then I found myself standing in front of a hospital, feeling drugged and woozy.

I pushed open the door and walked to the desk. There was a nurse there, smiling at me.

"Hi, Michael," she said.

I was stunned. How did she know my name? Was this a dream? Was I hallucinating? Was I dead?

"Lori called us," she said. "We already have your information. The doctor is ready to see you."

Similarly, a few weeks ago I discovered that I was wearing my watch upside-down. Again, I knew that this was a message to myself, and I even remembered the moment, earlier that day, when I had turned the watch upside-down. It was during lunch with Sohrab at S'nice. He noticed me do it, and we spent the rest of lunch discussing the capriciousness of memory. Later, though, when I discovered the upside-down watch, I couldn't remember what it was supposed to remind me of. In my frustration, I eventually I called Sohrab, only he couldn't remember either, nor was he certain that I ever had told him.

I eventually let go of the upside-down watch, but I'm still stuck on the So Delicious wrapper. Accordingly, I just taped it to the top left corner of the bathroom mirror. This way I'm bound to see it each morning when I wash my face. My hope is that the repeated reminder will spark my memory of the original message.

Addendum: On re-reading the above, I realized that I might forget, yet again, what the So Delicious wrapper is supposed to remind me of, so I got out a magic marker and wrote the following across the front of the wrapper:

Found on alarm clock. What the fuck was the message?

I've been hounding K about this because I'm certain that if she doesn't enforce the rule, my friends will either ignore it or turn it into a running gag, as if to collectively say, "Fuck him, he's dead and he was a controlling fucker anyway."

Each time I bring it up, K claims that she won't let this happen, except she says it in the sort of voice one uses with an impossible child, someone you'll say anything to in order to get him to leave you alone.

I did leave her alone for a time, but then we spent New Year's weekend in Connecticut with three close friends, and over breakfast on the last day I described the problem to the group. In short order my request was cast as an attempt to control what gets said at an event which, while it would be about me, wouldn't actually be for me since I would be dead. K nodded the whole time.

I chose to mention it at this breakfast in large part because Andrew was there, and I long ago pegged him as a likely saboteur. However he surprised me by responding in a way that only someone who knows my heart ever could.

"I don't think it's a big deal," he said. "It's a minimal ask that challenges folks to skip the bullshit. You're asking to be remembered."

It was Lucy, though, who had the best line: "Can we start now?"

"Fuck you" is another. This I say when I remember having hurt someone. I say it sharply, like a command to a barking dog.

"I love you, sweetie" is another. I say this when I wake in the night. If I'm addressing anyone, it's K, but usually I'm just saying it.

I've been thinking about things. I mean things in the sense of objects. This was brought on by Seymour, by writing about him.

I had a stuffed monkey of my own once. His name was Zip. I would put on puppet shows with him. I know this because there's a photo of me doing it. However I don't remember feeling affection for Zip, and I certainly didn't talk to him or play with him. He was a prop, nothing more.

Seymour, despite his utilitarian role, is not a prop. Rather he's a source of connection -- to K's childhood, to her mother, to every place she's lived. In this respect, Seymour is not unique in K's life. Our apartment is filled with K's things. They take up every shelf we have, and if we had more shelves, they would take up those as well.

By contrast, I have few things, all of which are filed away, save for a few dozen books.

I keep a folder of photos in a drawer. I take them out now and then, but I would never put them on the shelves or walls. It would be distracting, and numbing too, in that something seen again and again recedes into the background.

When a space is cluttered, I feel unsettled, agitated. I used to feel that way in our apartment because of K's things, but in time I've learned not to see them.

I often say that things -- objects, possessions -- have a psychic weight for me. This applies to precious things no less than junk. When something is precious, I want to protect it, preserve it. This is how I feel about the photos in my drawer, and it's also why I keep them in a drawer, where I never need to see them.

My ideal space would contain few objects beyond the functional necessities. The idea would be to evoke and support a mindset of, for lack of a better term, meditative focus.

I recently asked K how she would feel in such a space. Her answer was immediate and certain: "Bored and lonely."

I don't doubt her. K's things keep her company, and having company means a lot to her. Accordingly, her only complaint about our living room is that it doesn't have space for an L-shaped couch, since that would open up more socializing options.

I'm not against socializing options but it's the last place my mind goes when I think of ideal spaces.

Here I return to the photo of Zip. It was taken in the dining room of my childhood home, a dining room that had no dining room furniture because my parents couldn't agree on what to buy: my father wanted to get whatever we could afford, while my mother insisted on waiting until we had enough money for nice things. Similarly our living room had no living room furniture, just plants. We called these rooms the dining room and living room, although little of either happened in either.

The standoff lasted my entire childhood. For my sister it was a source of shame and embarrassment, but for me it was a boon. I would hook a toy basketball net over the dining room door and play by myself for hours, imitating the signature moves of my basketball heroes.

I loved that room.

K has a stuffed animal, a monkey, named Seymour. K's mother gave her Seymour when K was eight, which makes him a minimum of thirty-three years old now, depending when he was manufactured.

K sleeps with Seymour almost every night. She leans into him, wedging him into the crook of her arm and resting her chin on top of his head. If Seymour were a real monkey, he would quickly suffocate from this. Indeed, there's probably no better way to suffocate a monkey than what K does to Seymour.

Seymour has an enormous head; in fact his head is bigger than the rest of him. It's covered in finely-woven terry cloth and is firm without being too firm to sleep on. Miraculously (a word I do not use lightly), Seymour's head doesn't smell. None of him does, although he has spent more than ten thousand nights (I did the math) jammed into K's armpit and has never been washed. It's much like the miracle of Hanukkah.

The only time K sleeps without Seymour is when she's away. She says she does this because he's too big to bring anywhere, and I suppose that would be true if K went on backpack trips, but K doesn't go on backpack trips. In fact a few years ago, K put a large magnet on our refrigerator that shows a smiling woman reclining in bed under the words I love not camping. So I think it's something else that keeps Seymour confined to our bed. Perhaps it's embarrassment. Perhaps it's the idea of a forty-two year-old woman who can't sleep a single night without her stuffed monkey. It's not that people would know this was true about K; it's that K would know.

On the other hand, K did bring Seymour to college. However, as she explains it, most of her college roommates had some ridiculous thing like Seymour, so it didn't really matter.

After college K lived for a year on a kibbutz in Israel, during which time Seymour remained at home (in a box!), I suspect because K didn't want to be ridiculed by the hardcore kibbutzniks -- no-nonsense types trained in the use of automatic weapons.

A confession: Sometimes, when K is away, I sleep with Seymour. I use the same method as K. It's a nearly prone position, which normally hurts my back, but with Seymour's head propping me up, I wake without pain.

Also, when K's at home and I happen to get into bed before her, I sometimes hide Seymour under my body. Often K doesn't realize he's missing until she's about to turn off the light, at which point she'll sidle up to me in a manner indicating affection or perhaps even desire, then suddenly go for the monkey, crying, "Seymour is mine, my mommy gave him to me!"

When I asked K what people should know about Seymour, she said, simply, "That I love him." I love him too, in my way. He's a survivor.

Although Seymour was lovingly made, in a way few things are these days, his manufacturer had no way of knowing he would be suffocated all night, nearly every night, for thirty-three years. Because of this, and because time is kind to no one and nothing, Seymour is falling apart: his ears are split open; the paint of his pupils is chipping away; his goofy smile, a modest red thread, has been sewn to his face to prevent it from breaking (K: "I can't make him frown anymore"); and he has dozens of small tears, many of which K's mom repaired with dental floss.

The worst, though, is his paw pads. Seymour's brand name was Corky because his hind legs are stuffed with tiny bits of cork. Unfortunately his hind paw pads are prone to small tears through which the cork slowly leaks. In recent years K switched from dental floss to duct tape and then finally gave up and wrapped Seymour's leakier paw (the left) in a piece of fabric cut from an old sheet. The paw still leaks but the fabric contains the cork. Eventually K intends to cut open Seymour's paw pads and remove all the cork. This will solve the problem but at the price of eliminating the squishy crunchiness of Seymour's hind legs.

Such is life, I suppose. You do what you can, until you can do no more. In the best case, you succeed in bringing some joy and comfort to others, even if your own smile is permanently sewn to your face.

It's the first day of school and I can't find my classes.

I'm naked in public.

I die.

I put down the razor, turned off the water, and headed to my desk to send the email. On the way there I imagined myself standing with a group of strangers across the street and watching our building burn to the ground. Every few minutes or so someone new would join the group and then slowly realize (I would watch this as it happened) that I must live in the burning building because half my face isn't shaven.