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At the end of a chain with interlocking oval rings, a silver, antiqued pendant rested on the chest of Elena’s gray sweatshirt. Shaped like a moth with outstretched wings, it was engraved with intricate vein patterns and mirrored, trapezoidal marks. The moth’s abdomen segmented into tiers of carefully sculpted rings. In place of a thorax, a three-dimensional human skull stared through blackened eye sockets. An anonymous artisan had carved a tiny cavity to serve as the nose. This metallic moth evoked the design of an ancient aircraft, belonging to a civilization that leapt from worshipping nature to soaring through the skies, aiming for the stars.

I pointed at Elena’s necklace.

“That pendant you kept fiddling with… a striking piece of jewelry.”

She lifted it from her chest and held it up to admire it. Her fingers traced the moth’s wings as though caressing a lover.

“A gift from myself to myself, bought from a small business in England. Genus Cosmia, family Noctuidae.”

“You sure? There’s a family of moths whose thorax markings resemble a human skull. Death’s-head hawkmoths, I think they’re called. You know, like in The Silence of the Lambs.”

Elena narrowed her eyes at me. She opened her mouth with a smacking sound.

“Are you an expert in lepidopterology, questioning the taxonomy of my own damn pendant? Well, excuse me, master entomologist. I prefer to think of it as a Cosmia moth, if you don’t mind. I wear it to ward off idiots.”

“I’m guessing it’s not a hundred percent effective.”

Elena dipped her chin slightly and half-smiled while spearing me with her icy blues. Loose almond-blonde strands cascading near her cheeks framed her pale, oval face. She let the pendant drop onto her sweatshirt.

“Maybe not strong enough to repel the worst of them.”

“I didn’t mean to trigger an identity crisis for that cute, ominous moth of yours.”

“Hey, I understand them. They’ll keep flying into a flame over and over until their wings turn to ash. Like all of us who can’t stop destroying ourselves for something beautiful we can never reach. Funny how a piece of jewelry can carry the weight of one’s fucked-up existence.”

I emptied my glass, then set it on the table calmly. A breeze stirred the sago palms, making their fronds tremble.

“Can’t help but think that Siobhan is a fictionalized version of you, who also feels rotten and alienated. Are you suicidal?”

Elena leaned back in her rattan chair, arms crossed as she gazed upward at a sky that had turned a dull slate-gray, like a battleship’s hull. The air hung heavy with the scent of impending rain.

“Closing the blinds on a never-ending night… The ultimate expression of individualism, of a person’s sovereignty over themselves. I’ve been alive for twenty-eight years, but I usually feel like I’m seventy. Tired from the moment I wake up. I’m like a milk bottle forgotten in the back of a fridge for too long. If you open it, the stench of the curdled, rancid mess inside will tell you to dump it down the drain. Hell, throw out the bottle too. And how could I be surprised? Unless you belong to some lucky breed, this world will beat the shit out of you. It’ll leave you bruised and bloodied on a sidewalk, and if you dare to stand up and ask why, it’ll kick you in the stomach. That I still experience joy from time to time, despite the decay and misery, is a fucking miracle.”

“Have you ever found yourself that gone? About to jump, whatever form that leap would take?”

Elena wrapped her fingers around her glass of coffee and stared into its black surface like a scryer. Her voice came from a distant, hollow place.

“I wish I could do anything to prevent it, but one day my oldest friend will return for its next uninvited visit. Maybe it will find me, like other times, curled in bed. A hole will open in my brain. I will feel its edges expanding, reaching out to the corners of my mind. A murky, ravenous void devouring everything that makes life bearable. Its gravity deforming space-time, causing the bed and the apartment and the building and the planet itself to warp toward its blackness, one light after another winking out. I will find myself holding onto the bedclothes even though I know that once again the void will gobble me down, and inside of that pitch-black pit, the things I used to love will become as appealing as a pile of dead insects. Then the echoing mockery, speaking with the voice of those who have hurt me, of those I have hurt. Hey, you waste. Hey, you monster. All the ways you kept busy, all those words you wielded and songs you listened to, did you think they could stop me from finding you again? What are you but a scared little girl bawling for her mother?”

I swallowed. My throat felt as though I’d gulped sand. Elena’s shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath. She ran her fingers through her almond-blonde hair, disturbing its arrangement.

“Then the emptiness. A bottomless, sucking nothing that makes you want to crawl out of your skin. The only way to feel anything other than the void’s cold would be to tear the flesh off your bones. To bite your tongue until it comes off and blood fills your mouth. To gouge your eyes out. Pain is always real, always true. But even then, you would remain trapped inside your skull. A ghost haunting the ruins of a mind. Nothing to hold onto except the idea of it all ending. Then you find yourself with a knife pressed against a pulsing artery. Sitting on the floor of your bathroom, the tiles cold and hard against the soles of your feet, staring at a bottle of pills. Standing at the edge of a bridge, watching the cars pass below. Facing an approaching train and wondering if your legs will obey when you order them to leap. Unafraid of death but terrified of the pain that leads up to it, even as you tell yourself that the momentary suffering will lead to permanent silence, to a sleep so deep that the alarm clock of life will never jolt you again.”

Elena fell silent. Wispy blonde locks escaped around her temples, partially shadowing her pale blues as they fixed on me. Her lips trembled as if she were fighting to hold back a smile, but they betrayed her, curving into a slight grin that barely parted at the center, that dimpled her cheeks, and framed her mouth with black parentheses. Her smile looked like a jagged crack across the bone-white surface of a ceramic mask that hid a terrible visage. I reached for my glass to take another sip of decaf, but the bitter beverage was gone.

“So, to answer your question, Jon: yes, I’ve been that far gone. And I’ll be there again. I’m one day away from becoming Siobhan. I’ve never had someone to pull me back, I’ve never even had anyone tell me, ‘It’s going to pass,’ or ‘You’re not alone.’ So I’ve always had to claw my way out. And I can’t say that I backed away from the abyss because of some grand realization about how life is wonderful, or that I’d miss out on the taste of coffee, or the sound of a good song. I didn’t jump because I’m a fucking coward. Afraid of pain. Of the knife’s cold bite. Of waking up in the hospital with a tube shoved down my throat. Of the train only cutting me in half. Of the rocks only breaking my spine or my pelvis, leaving me crippled and helpless, to drown when the tide rises. Maybe that’s the worst thing: not being strong enough to take your own life. Not brave enough to die.”

A chill rippled down my spine, leaving a wake of goosebumps along my forearms. I couldn’t peel my gaze off the creature in front of me. I felt like I’d stumbled into a secret chamber where the world was stripped of pretenses and lies, and only the raw, pulsating heart of things remained.

Elena’s eyes, unblinking and intense—the pale blue of a sky filtered by a thin layer of smog, of an alien world’s sun, of loneliness—drilled through flesh and bone to reach the deepest part of me.

“There it is again,” Elena said, “that constipated expression. Maybe you shouldn’t ask girls about suicide before their coffees have cooled.”

“Thank you for trusting me with that. I’m sorry you had to go through it alone.”

“If I had shuffled off this shitty Earth, it would have been such a loss, huh?”

“There would be an emptiness where someone who brought beauty into the world used to exist. No more stories from you, no more of your thoughts, no more of your voice.”

“You think that’s what I do, bring beauty? I’m just a nutcase with an overactive imagination. Listen, Jon: my final revenge against the world will be a feeble fart in the dark. Or a shit stain. People who knew me in person will pretend to be sad for a week, maybe less, and then on to the next thing.” Elena sighed, and shifted in her chair. “If this is the point where you stand up and tell me that I’m too fucked in the head and too much of a lost cause, I’ll understand. Hell, I’d bail on me if I could.”

“No, I’m just glad I can sit here and listen to what you have to say.”

“A front-row seat to the freak show. Maybe you’re just glad you still have a chance to get laid. But hey, this emotional leper has survived for twenty-eight years. I might live to a hundred. They’ll have to stick me in a sarcophagus along with a warning not to open it ever.”

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Author’s note: today’s song is “No Surprises” by Radiohead.