When My Phone Rings After Midnight

on a friendship circling around suicide

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I ended my friendship with Harold years ago.

When my phone rings after midnight, I am seized by one of three fears: first, that someone I love has died or been in a terrible accident; second, that it’s Harold calling on one of his darker binges; finally, in a morbid combination of the two, that Harold, my friend of seven years, has successfully killed himself. I upgraded my AT&T plan to accommodate his frequent messages, but he still calls me—mumbling into the phone at four in the morning, telling me he can’t take this much longer.

He calls to say that he's tired of the merry-go-round of mental health specialists who have been in his life since he was a suicidal child. No stranger to the psychiatric ward, he claims to have changed his PIN code to 5150. My end of these conversations have become increasingly blank, which wasn’t always the case; I once contributed to these communications with my own share of pain. In my freshman year of college, I, despairing and freshly diagnosed with manic depression, confessed to Harold over a computer screen that I felt like ending it all. He said, “It’s too early in the morning to kill yourself. Wait until a respectable hour. Do you think Ian Curtis killed himself at 6 AM? Do you want to go to hell with hippies?” He followed this rousing sentiment with a JPEG of a puddle shaped like a brontosaurus.

We’d supported one another for years. I met him through his blog, which expanded to chats, phone calls, and the occasional in-person visit; he is currently a creative writing PhD student in Houston. Though I saw him a few months ago in California, our friendship is confined mostly to the limits of technology, which makes for an excruciating form of a suicide watch. His most recent text message read, “You say hello, I say good-bye.” This was in response to the simple, “Hello, darling.”

Harold is one of many suicidal people who’ve come into my life, and yet he is also unique in that his depression, though milder at times, has been disturbingly intractable. I knew that my aunt, who showed me her slit wrists outside of a food court when I was thirteen, could overcome the emotional devastation that was her husband’s affair; my mother, who told me in my bleak mood that we “could kill ourselves together,” had her ups as well as her downs; Dan, who wandered into the woods with a shotgun in the ninth grade, had a family who loved him and guided him through his teenaged angst; even most of the depressives I encountered as an inpatient in the Yale Psychiatric Institute found some magical combination of pills or shock therapy that worked for them in the end. For those people, it was the mental illness that threatened their otherwise decent lives, whereas Harold sees his entire life, illness or no, as a threat to freedom from pain. (For years, his most common, vaguely childish complaint was that he had no friends, which is not entirely difficult to believe given his acidic personality. He has literally spat at ex-girlfriends; he has mocked my writing and called male friends pussies for being devoted to their girlfriends. His family has also disowned him. Feeling that this subject is too tender to touch, I have never asked why.)

Despite his depression, Harold has been able to maintain a certain level of humor about the whole ordeal. At a recent doctor’s visit, upon hearing that she suspected his medications were making him suicidal, he replied, “I thought that was just my newfound can-do attitude!” I cling to stories like this. I am, to be honest, relieved when he calls at four in the morning, saying that he can’t take it anymore. I am relieved when he sends me text messages that say, “Every time I get on a roof, you know?” I am relieved to hear from him, even when he’s not funny, because the alternative is silence.