You know when you reach the stage where your brain just cannot handle any more? Like putting things in a box until one falls out. You put it back, and something else falls out.

My life is like that.

Before you think this is 'just another of your boring blogs', stay with me just a minute longer. I have some food for thought which I wish to share.

Friday night saw me confess my fears, beliefs, and inner turmoil to a friend. I do not know her very well, and in the short space of time we've been talking I owe her so much. Without interruption, judgement or condemnation she sat for hours and listened, encouraged and debated. 

Saturday was a dark day. I spent the day studying suicide, planning, thinking.

Sunday saw me stumble around in the light of morning, reality not sinking in and on auto-pilot I began the day's tasks. Putting washing in the bedroom, something caught my eye.

 A man. My neighbour. Hanging from the tree at the end of his garden which is outside my bedroom window.

The craziness was over. It was time to wake up now. I couldn't be THAT delusional, could I? I needed to connect with reality. I look into neighbouring gardens for people who might know he was there. I was alone. Nobody else knew what my eyes were telling me. My inauditory voice screams at me. This isn't belief or fiction or fantasy or loss of sanity. This is real. I need help. NOW.

It jerks me into action.

Police, paramedics – you don't need the finer details. His death was not one masked in the beauty or significance we sometimes desire. It was marred with stupid cups of sweet tea and forensics with their white boiler suits and tool kits. I could give you the graphics, but due to the nature of this site I aim not to upset, but to inform.

Lead gently away from the scene, I am taken to hospital to be treated for shock. There are two (again, inauditory) voices screaming in my head. One saying its not me that needs the help, its him – he needs help so much so God damn it stop wasting time on me and go and help him. He's cold. Its snowing. Wrap him in a blanket. The other tells me I have to tell them. I have to tell them what's been driving me to think of doing the same thing for so long before I end up the same as him, and another person in the same deep shock as me.

A few soft words and kind smiles and I start talking. Finally through somebody else's death I realise the shockingly painful reality of my own troubles and open up. If it wasn't for my friend, they would have assumed my story had been fabricated through shock. She'd phoned for help on Friday night and already told them. The foundations to my being listened to for once had been set, catalysed by the tragic loss of a man, a son, a neighbour and and now, a landmark on the road to getting somewhere. The irony consumes me.

 I'm still in shock – I know that. I am still digesting the horrors that Sunday brought. Time. It takes time.

I could sit here and type all night. I want to – I need to – but nobody will have read this far, and I won't want to read it back. This blog is not for you or for me. Its for him. If only he knew. If only.

Thank you for providing venting space.