Millimeters From Death
I'm writing this from one step beyond where I once was. Being able to verbalize this is an exercise in letting the themes and experience wash over me as I hold my breath. The wave will crash and recede, and I still stand, unpeturbed. It's a small marker of confidence that I will no longer fall prey to destruction.
REDACTED can fuck you up super easily, but you know if it's killing you. It warns you. You'll feel it burning your eyes, ripping down your sinuses and eating at your lungs. I know what I'm dealing with -- I read some case literature regarding exposure to put some healthy respect into me earlier. (it's strangely gristly, yet written with that typical distant, detached, medicalized tone...) Here's the procedure and contingency plans. I know my chemistry.
I grinned when I got my admission letter to REDACTED. I knew of REDACTED's reputation for wearing down students, but I'd already proven to myself and everyone watching that I have this "grit" thing. I'm smart, I have a head start, and I'm able to take a grind. Perfect ACT composite, 5.0 semester GPA after a term of 7 AP/DE classes, varsity track and field, the laundry list of STEM extracurriculars with a few first's and founded's, etc etc. I was admitted after all, and admissions doesn't make mistakes. My unwavering perseverance will take me through, I told myself.
I didn't quite feel it, but I knew I needed to believe it.
I got through the core courses somewhat unscathed, somehow. First term with grades had all A's. Then the B's started sneaking in here and there. Then I was suddenly dying. It seemed as if time itself was killing me — even though my upper-div courses were objectively easier than core, I was struggling to pass. My courseload shrunk until I was taking the bare minimum to stay enrolled, and yet I was drowning. Starving for air, for oxygen, for something.
Why was I here? Why was I doing this?
Since I was a kid, science had consumed me. I was fascinated with the natural world, with transformation and processes and mechanisms. Integrating theory into my understanding was an obsession. Manipulating a web of knowledge and matter brought a sublime joy to me. Compulsively engaging with this sense brought a sense of fiery drive to my life, powering me through anything that stood in my way of doing what I wanted to do.
And then I entered REDACTED. I opened myself up and welcomed the enveloping machine of sets and classes, hoping to be transformed through the process into someone, something, anything better. I desperately tried to spin in my place, to interface appropriately with the other gears.
When I was placed on involuntary leave for the first time, I found solace in self-procured glassware. On days when I'd run experiments, I often failed to sleep. To eat. To talk to my partner (much to his dismay). That old familiar feeling of being consumed was here once again, and the feeling was addictive. Not just in the hedonistic sense, but psychologically too: I desperately needed this feeling. This is what had been missing all my time at REDACTED. Living for this feeling is reinvigorating; it pushes me to survive, to dive, to grow. My eyes were lost in the chattering glass, burbling liquids. My breath captured in faint fumes. The dew of condensing sulfuric acid focused my attention until I was lost in its vacuum while my water aspirator screamed away for hours, the carefully controlled corrosive vapors dissolving away all the external baggage. All the metal chains flaking and hissing away, exposed tumors and growths carbonizing on contact. A meditation culminating in internal rebirth and renewal thorugh fumes over flames.
I knew this was unsustainable, that I couldn't have this forever. I mean, first, there is a pretty hard ceiling to what I was doing — this isn't societally recognized as useful work in any sense. It's also kinda expensive, even if I was doing everything hardware-store style, ordering as few "actual chemicals" as possible. There was something else nagging me though, something darker than concerns over how I'm spending my time and money. Who am I becoming if I reform myself around this hobby? Do I have any hope for growth? Is this a becoming, a salve, or a dope? Eventually I just avoided the question, and this came to a quet conclusion: it was time to return to school.
Term proceeded along the typical pattern, and ofc I did the smart thing and refrained from unauthorized experiments during that time. After all, I had an advanced inorganic lab class (during which the professor told me I moved and asked questions as if I was experienced, despite my insistence otherwise...) and the activities satisfied me. I did not need anything interrupting my sleep, and I had to take every moment to stay afloat. And yet, things started to decline. I had to drop the only lecture class that stirred me, philosophy of quantum mechanics, after writing the only academic essay I've ever written that I felt like I could sincerely stand behind. Which I had dedicated a week to completing (after it had already been due, and not due to a lack of dilligence on my part), so now I was a week behind in every other class with nothing to show but good wishes from the prof whose class I dropped. Midterms came and went, I was barely living. I was drowning once again. I was starving. I was losing focus in lab, going from one of the most efficient students to having to repeat things multiple times. Did I just spot that plate already? How many ml's did I just squirt into that flask? I was crumbling in lab, imprisoned by the tasks I had to restart.
So quickly had my appetite for living left.
I had thought about experimenting with REDACTED before. In fact, I already had, just on very small scales and without ever handling the pure substance (it was produced and consumed in the same flask). In pure form, REDACTED was alluring. It has a magnificent deep color, a literal heaviness to it that results in a tangible physicality to the gas. Its mere appearance alone raises hairs even to those unacquainted. I had mostly just toyed with the idea, but at this point, I was vulnerable to its attraction. I bought a full-face respirator and began.
I had contingency plans, and plans upon those plans. I knew the risk I was taking on. I had calculated the potential exposure for myself and my surroundings. As one clear liquid dripped into another and the bloody color began to evolve, I was transfixed once again. I was able to forget. The world dropped away. A haze fell over my face. I admired the blinding, choking vapors, my life preserved by two millimeters of plastic sealed to my face. I was too close, and the fumes punched me through my cartridges.
It was at this moment, I knew. There would be no contingency plan. I was too far gone. There was a certainty in my heart, an irresistible fixation, that I would carry out the original procedure no matter what. Even if it came to condemning my lungs to ARDS, none of that mattered to the moment I was experiencing. I could not let it go uninterrupted because I had nothing after this anyway. Life isn't life after this is over.
I had lost hope. I was already a walking corpse, and I couldn't care less if that manifested physically. The fumes kept hitting. I had the sanity left to perform a cartridge change instead of holding my breath. Containment was achieved. I began to clean up.
After that event, I stared sometimes at REDACTED hall. The thought would pass through me when I walked by, how strong are those 9th floor windows?
Would anyone stop me if I took a sledgehammer up the elevator?
And the thought would fade just as fast as it came, at its farthest inciting guilt at the thought of leaving behind my cats and partner. I had too little space in my brain for that. Classes called for me.
If you know about this event through other means and this writing makes you uncomfortable, you still have my permission to joke about it.
or don't.
up to you.
I can compartmentalize just fine, don't worry about it.