The Story of the Man Who Has Never Thought of Suicide

Sometimes, the ultimate end is much more desirable

In the dim-lit room, its walls crumbling under the weight of forgotten time, he sat on the edge of his bed—too close to the floor, too far from the comfort of self-assurance. The man who had once believed that his every step was followed by the glow of unseen stars now found himself in a darkened corner of existence, where even the most familiar shadows seemed alien to him. His name—insignificant now—was once a word on everyone's lips, a symphony of adoration and devotion. Now, it was just a hollow syllable in the void.

The woman, the only woman who had ever dared to matter to him, had left him. Her absence wasn’t sudden; it was the kind of departure that slowly unfurled like the fading echoes of a once-lustrous song. She had seen through him. Perhaps, that was the root of her departure, though he could never be sure. He, who had always viewed himself as a monument of invulnerability, now found himself in pieces—a thousand splinters of who he thought he was.

But why? He had never questioned death before. He had never even considered it as an alternative. He had lived with the comforting certainty that life—his life—was meant to be savored, applauded, feared. Death, that vague specter that danced on the periphery of most men’s minds, had never been his concern. He was a man of ambition, of grandiosity, of a love that was impossible for anyone else to understand. Now, with the thin thread of his ego unraveling at the seams, he stood at the precipice of a kind of death he had never imagined: the collapse of self.

The truth was, his loneliness was suffocating, but not in the way that might be expected. He had lived with solitude as a companion, no stranger to the isolation of a mind so singular that only he could comprehend its labyrinthine complexity. What was this void, then? It was not the absence of her, not the aching loss of a person, but the collapse of the image he had crafted for himself. That was the abyss that he now faced—the terrifying realization that the world had revolved around him only because he had forced it to.

The phone beside him buzzed, an intruder in his solitude. He ignored it, just as he had ignored the world when it had tried to remind him of his dependence on others. Yet now, even as the screen flashed with the names of people who once sought his approval, he felt no pull to answer. He had never cared for their opinions, and now their presence felt like nothing more than an affront to his disintegration.

His mind spun in circles, a whirlpool of thoughts too tangled to escape. If only he had been more attentive, more attentive to the subtle gestures, to the glances that spoke louder than words. If only he hadn’t seen love as something that existed solely for his benefit. Was that not his mistake? The woman had not been his mirror; she had been a being of her own, and he had failed to recognize it. He had not seen the quiet resentment in her eyes, nor the weary weariness of being with someone who only mirrored back his own reflection, without ever asking for hers.

And yet, there was something almost satisfying in this regret. The remorse coursed through him like a slow poison, tingling in his fingertips, settling deep in his chest. He felt it—this sudden vulnerability—ripping through the hardened shell of the man he had once been. It was a bitter kind of clarity, one that was more painful than any knife’s edge. He was not afraid to die. He was afraid to be nothing more than an echo of his former self.

"Why am I still alive?" he whispered to the empty room, the words like a prayer that no god would answer. The thought of suicide did not come to him in the form of a resolution or a final act. He had never entertained such an idea. It was not that he could not die; it was that he had never imagined himself fading away in any way that wasn’t spectacular. Suicide, a craven surrender, was beneath him. He was too grand for such an ignoble end.

Instead, he sat there, tortured by his own existence, surrounded by the remnants of his life—a life that had always been his to command, his to sculpt. Now, it was as though the world had rejected him, and he could only stare in stunned disbelief at the wreckage. The light from the window seemed to mock him, piercing through the cracks in the curtains like a judgment he could not escape.

As the hours bled into each other, he realized something else. It was not that he was a man who had never thought of suicide. No, he had thought of it incessantly—not in the finality of death, but in the quiet disintegration of everything he once believed he could control. The true torment was not the loss of her. The torment was that he could no longer control himself.

The man who had once stood as the centerpiece of his own world now realized with a profound ache that he was not the center of anything. The world was indifferent to him, and her departure had revealed it in all its cruel simplicity. The woman, the love of his life, had left him not because he was unworthy—but because he had failed to see that the love between them was never meant to be an object to possess.

So he sat there in his brokenness, the clock ticking its maddening rhythm, and thought to himself: I have never thought of suicide. But I have thought of dying a thousand deaths, a thousand quiet deaths that unfold within the hollows of the self. And this—this is the cruelest form of death I could ever know.

And yet, he remained, sitting in the stale air of his room, alive—only because death had become too complicated for him to grasp.