The Easy Exit

There is an hour — you know the one — when a man is alone with nothing but his own thoughts, and the thoughts have turned prosecutor. Three in the morning, or the flat gray four when even the guards go quiet. In that hour the mind does its coldest arithmetic, and the exit — the easy one, the final one — stops looking like a horror and starts to look like a mercy. Like rest. Like the one door still unlocked.

I know that hour from the inside. And I knew the men who walked through that door. Here in the morning — coffee, a legal file spread between us, a joke about the food — and gone by nightfall. Not the weak ones; there are no weak ones down there, only broken ones, and they broke where the machine was built to break them: on the shame, on the hopelessness, on the twenty-three-hour silence that tells a man the world has already closed his file. Vergänglich. Here, then not. I carried more than one of them out the gate in my head, and I carry them still.

So hear this from a man who sat with it and stayed: the voice that says the exit is the only door left is the most persuasive liar the dark has ever made — and it is still lying. It lied to me. It was wrong every time. The despair is real; the verdict it hands down is false — and the whole distance between living and dying hides in the gap between those two things.

If tonight the hand at your own throat is your own, put this down and dial or text 988, and say the true thing out loud to another human being. Then, when the sun has come up on you one more time, come find me. Do not be the man who is gone by nightfall. Stay for the morning. I have watched it come for men who swore it never would. It came for me.

Get busy living.
I'll be on the far side.