When I was eighteen years old I decided I wanted to die decadently. My girlfriend’s best friend had just moved out of her house, and her mother, a realtor, was still trying to sell it. I moved in in the meantime. It was the middle of January. My girlfriend gave me a hundred dollars. I decided I would write my memoirs as a series of elegies, and when the money ran out, I’d put my head in the oven like Sylvia Plath.

No one knew about my plan to kill myself. They thought I was a hero for running away from home and school and life to do nothing but sit in an empty house, write and smoke cigarettes. I thought I was a hero too, but for all sorts of different reasons.

I couldn’t use any electricity, because no utilities could show up on the meter of the empty house, or someone would come to check it out. Probably the cops. So I sat in that cold dark house day in day out, into the night where I wrote by candlelight, and woke up in the morning cold and distorted and hungry.

The first few nights were the hardest. I was too cold to sleep, and lots of times too cold to write. The sounds of the house settling in the January snow made the dark hallways shiver behind short gasps of candle flame. I lay out flat on the cold linoleum kitchen floor and watched the candle toss shadows from the sink and the freezer and the cabinet on my stacks of notebook paper.

The mornings were blessings. I could write all day and take long walks in the snow. One morning I realized I was no longer a part of society. I was free, and every moment of my life was felt, like I’d never thought about it before. I smoked cigarettes all afternoon, and wrote, putting the butts out in a glass filled with snow, so they would hiss. When my stomach retched from lack of food, I ran outside and watched it steam on the snow beneath where I threw my still smoking cigarette and felt closer to life and death and health and disease than I felt even to my own sense of ego.

By the end of the second week, I didn’t even feel the need to write anymore. It was wonderful. I was delirious, having conversations with shadows I called watchers who watched me while I watched back and they warned me that the dead are watchers, so watch how you live. I was warm and cold, delirious all the time, hazy, like the flame of the candle taking shadows of icicles in the kitchen window, and throwing them into my chest, all in alliance with the moon.

I was almost out of money, so I went Ice Skating one night, drunk drinking cheap red on a nearby lake and waited for the ice to crack. I walked back to the house, and grabbed the head of a snowman on the way. Back inside the house I put the head in a pan, opened the door of the oven, and told him: “You first.”

After he was finished, I drank his remains from the pan, and looked into the mouth of that oven. I got sick on the floor, and retched around for about half an hour before I fell asleep. When I woke my mother was there. I don’t know how she found me. I thought I was still hallucinating. She told me: “It’s your choice. You can stay here and write your memoirs and die, or you can come home with me and live out the rest of your life.”

I went with her, of course. The rest of my life was all I had.

-Whit Frazier, 2006