As many Fernets as hours of sleep — yet I feel strangely, biologically improbably good at 6:30am.

I was out last night with my friend J; having one of those corner-of-the-bar conversations that starts nowhere but ends up somewhere important and fulfilling. J, specifically, is my collaborator: he acts in many of my plays. In the play we’re currently working on, he plays a college professor whose student comes to him in office hours with suicidal ideations; incidentally, J’s friend hung himself last week.

We all want to have ‘real’ conversations — at least, I doubt anyone would claim to really desire ‘fake’ conversations — but honestly, we rarely achieve them; we rarely break through the wall of pleasantries and chatter.

The reason that I feel strangely awake, strangely good, is that even though I didn’t sleep much, and drank too much, J and I were able not only to disburden ourselves of our darkest thoughts, but to evolve, in the course of dialogue, productive thoughts about how and why to live. When someone — a peer — kills themselves, I think it’s only reasonable for us to think about it ourselves; to ask: did they do the brave thing? Are they better off than I am?

It’s incredibly important to be able to talk about suicide without guilt; without the aura of taboo. We can choose to punctuate our life sentence whenever we want; every day we get out a bed, we’ve implicitly chosen not to kill ourselves — whether we know it or not. Or, conversely — we should be choosing — we should know what we’re doing by living: not-dying. To await death passively, is to be…