The Mercy of Numbness

There is a kind of anger that doesn’t look like anger from the outside. It doesn’t slam doors or break plates or shout loud enough for the neighbors to hear. It isn’t loud or explosive or visible in the ways people recognize. It lives deeper than that, buried so far beneath the surface that most days I don’t even know it’s there until something shifts inside me and I feel the ground crack. It burns without flame, like magma trapped under miles of earth, pressurized and restless, waiting for the smallest fracture to split the surface open. It hums quietly under everything… under conversations, under laughter, under ordinary moments like washing dishes or sitting in traffic, an underground heat that never fully cools. That’s the kind of anger that is not clean anger, not sharp and simple, not something you can point at and say this is why I feel this way. It’s tangled in love, braided with longing, soaked in guilt so deeply that the anger itself feels contaminated, like touching it might make me a worse person. It’s an anger that feels almost forbidden, like I’m betraying the very person I ache for by admitting that part of me is furious with them. Furious that they left, furious that they hurt so much they couldn’t stay, furious that they carried their pain to a place I couldn’t follow, and furious that I am still here, carrying the weight of both of us. It’s the kind of anger that doesn’t roar; it throbs. It pulses slowly, like a heartbeat that sometimes feels less like life and more like an echo of something that was broken and never set back quite right.

It rose up in me without warning. I had been crying off and on for hours in the middle of the night, the kind of crying that doesn’t even feel dramatic anymore, just tired and rhythmic, like waves hitting a shoreline long after everyone has gone home, long after the lights have gone out and the only sound left is the tide dragging itself in and out of the dark. My eyes burned, my throat ached, and the room felt heavy, thick with the kind of silence that presses against your ears until you start to hear your own heartbeat echoing back at you. I had been in an argument with someone I love deeply, my soul was tired and the feeling of desperately needing to speak with Chris washed over me. At some point, my body moved before my mind caught up, the way it sometimes does when grief pulls the strings. I opened my phone without thinking, my thumb navigating by memory more than intention, scrolling to my favorites list like I had done a thousand times before, and I pressed his name. For a fraction of a second, it felt normal. Familiar. Like muscle memory. Like all the years when he was just one call away, when hearing his voice was as easy as breathing, when the world still made sense in the simple way it does when the people you love are still alive. And then it rang. That sound cut through the quiet like glass breaking, sharp and unbearable, because in that instant I remembered. He’s gone. He’s not going to answer. He’s never going to answer again. The realization hit so hard it felt physical, like my stomach dropped through the floor and my lungs forgot how to work. I hung up so fast my hands were shaking, my fingers clumsy and cold, but the damage was already done. A few seconds later, the phone rang back, and my chest tightened before I even looked at the screen, his smiling face staring back at me. A stranger’s voice answered when I picked up. Calm. Ordinary. Alive. I’m not sure why I answered it at all, maybe I needed confirmation it really was not him. “Hi, I have a missed call from this number. Is everything ok?” And in that moment, hearing another human being speak from the space that used to belong to him felt like something inside me tore open all over again, like walking into a childhood home and finding strangers living in every room, laughing in our bunk bed, wearing his clothes, their voices echoing where memories used to live.

Someone else. Another human being existing inside the space that used to belong to him. Breathing on the other end of his line, speaking casually, unaware that they were standing in the doorway of a life that had collapsed. Living a life that has nothing to do with the man who used to laugh into that receiver, who used to know me better than anyone on this earth, who could hear the shift in my breathing and know something was wrong before I ever said a word. The ordinariness of that stranger’s voice felt unbearable, like the world had erased something sacred and replaced it with static. I said, “Sorry, it was a misdial,” and my voice sounded calm, almost detached, like I was watching myself from somewhere far away, but my body was already reacting, betraying the storm that was rising under my skin. My ears burned like they were on fire, heat crawling up my neck and into my scalp. My head pounded so hard I could feel my pulse in my teeth, in my temples, in the hollow of my throat. My fingertips tingled, my hands trembling, my skin humming like I was standing too close to a live wire, like grief itself was electricity moving through me with nowhere to discharge. My stomach twisted, my chest tightened, and my breath came shallow and sharp, like I had just run from something I couldn’t see. And then the anger came, fast and violent and absolute, not like a spark but like a match dropped into gasoline, a sudden, roaring heat that swallowed everything else in an instant, so hot it almost felt like relief, because at least anger is loud, at least anger has a shape, at least anger feels like something other than the hollow, endless ache of missing him.

I hate anger. It’s the one emotion I’ve always tried to outrun, like if I just stayed soft enough, patient enough, forgiving enough, I could bypass it altogether, like gentleness could be a kind of armor. I’ve always wanted to be the one who understands, the one who gives grace, the one who absorbs the sharp edges so no one else has to feel them. Anger feels loud and dangerous to me, like a fire that could burn everything good if I let it breathe. So I bury it. I swallow it. I convince myself it isn’t there. But grief doesn’t care what emotions you prefer. Grief is ruthless in that way. It drags every single feeling out into the light, whether you’re ready or not, whether you want to see it or not. It pries open the locked rooms inside you and throws the windows wide, letting everything howl at once.

And I was furious. Furious that he left me, in the most raw and selfish way a human heart can be furious, the kind of anger that comes from love with nowhere left to go. Furious that he chose an exit instead of staying in the fire with me, instead of fighting beside me, instead of letting us carry the weight together the way we always had. Furious that I have to live with this echo in my chest, this constant low-grade terror humming under my skin, this fear that everyone I love is temporary, that every goodbye might be the last one and I won’t know it until it’s too late. Furious that he left wounds in me he will never be here to help heal, that he left questions with no answers, conversations that will never be finished, apologies that will never be spoken. Furious that the world kept spinning like nothing happened, that the sun still rises, that grocery stores still open, that people laugh in parking lots, that phone numbers get reassigned to strangers who have no idea they’re holding ghosts in their hands. Furious that life just keeps moving forward with this unbearable normalcy, like nothing sacred was ever lost, like the universe didn’t split in half and leave me standing on the wrong side of it.

And underneath all of that, a deeper, quieter fury… the kind that aches instead of burns… the realization that I will never get to be angry with him in the ordinary ways again. Never roll my eyes at something stupid he said or shove his shoulder and tell him he was being ridiculous. Never argue about nothing, about music or jokes or who was funnier, the kind of arguments that only exist when love is safe and time feels endless. Never hang up in frustration only to call back five minutes later because neither of us could stay mad for long, because the silence between us always felt heavier than whatever we were arguing about. That kind of anger is human. Alive. It breathes and moves and resolves itself. The anger I have now is different. It’s useless. It has nowhere to go, nowhere to land, no one to hear it or answer it or soften it. It just circles inside me like a tornado trapped in a bottle, lightning flashing against glass, thunder with no sky to break into, pressure building with no release until it feels like my chest might crack open just to give it somewhere to escape.

And then, as always, the guilt arrives. Thick and suffocating, creeping in like smoke under a door, filling my lungs before I even realize it’s there. How dare I be angry at someone who was in so much pain? How dare I make his death about my abandonment, my wounds, my loneliness, when he was fighting battles I couldn’t see? The questions come like accusations, sharp and relentless, turning all that heat inward until the anger starts to collapse in on itself. It feels like a building imploding, the structure of it caving inward in slow motion, everything falling into a dense, choking cloud of dust. And I’m left standing in the wreckage of my own emotions, coughing, disoriented, surrounded by fragments of love and rage and sorrow so tangled together I can’t separate them anymore, choking on feelings I don’t even know how to name, only knowing that they are heavy, and sharp, and impossibly hard to carry.

That’s how I ended up on the bathroom floor at two in the morning on a quiet Saturday, the kind of quiet that feels almost eerie, like the whole world is asleep and you’re the only one left awake to witness your own unraveling. The floor was cold against my skin, seeping through my clothes, grounding me in a way nothing else ever has been able to, and I sat there shaking so hard my teeth were chattering, my hands trembling in my lap like they didn’t belong to me anymore. My heart hurt with every single beat, not metaphorically but physically… a deep, aching pressure in my chest like it was bruised and swollen, like every pulse was pressing against a wound that refused to close. The crying had wrung me out completely, left me hollow and spent, like a rag twisted dry until there was nothing left to squeeze from it, and what came after wasn’t relief. It wasn’t peace. It was nothing, a strange and empty stillness that felt almost unreal, like stepping into a room where all the furniture has been taken and even your footsteps echo back at you.

Numbness isn’t peaceful. People think it is, but it isn’t. It’s quiet, but it’s the quiet of an empty house after everyone has left, when the air feels heavy and stale and time stretches so long it almost stops moving. It’s the kind of silence where you can hear the refrigerator humming in the distance, the electricity buzzing in the walls, the faintest creak of the neighbor’s floor, and all of it feels louder than it should because there is nothing else to fill the space. It’s the feeling of my heart wrapping itself in gauze, layer after layer, a desperate, instinctive attempt to slow the bleeding because it knows it can’t survive another full hemorrhage tonight. It’s not healing, not really. It’s triage. It’s survival mode. It’s the body pulling the emergency brake on feeling because the alternative would be drowning, and even as I sit there on that cold floor, empty and exhausted, some small part of me knows this numbness is only temporary, just a thin, fragile shield between me and the tidal wave that will eventually come rushing back in.

I know this numbness won’t last. I know the tide will come back in, because it always does. Grief moves like water, receding just far enough to make you think you can breathe again before it returns, heavier, colder, carrying pieces of wreckage with it. The longing will rise again, the memories will surface in flashes so vivid they feel like time travel, and the sharp little stings of abandonment will find me in the most ordinary places… standing in a grocery store aisle staring at a snack he used to love, sitting at a red light with nowhere to look but at my own thoughts, hearing a song on the radio that hits a note inside me I didn’t know was still exposed. I know all of it is waiting just beneath the surface, patient as the ocean, immense and unmoving, biding its time while I float above it pretending, for a moment, that the water beneath me isn’t endless. But right now, I am floating. Not peacefully. Not comfortably. Just… floating. Like someone who has been swimming for hours in cold, dark water, muscles cramping, lungs burning, mind slipping into that strange quiet that comes from exhaustion, and finally rolling onto their back, staring at a sky that feels impossibly far away, too tired to keep fighting, too tired to even be afraid of what might be swimming beneath them.

As someone who has always felt everything so deeply, I never thought I would crave numbness. I used to believe feeling everything was proof I was alive, proof my heart was still open, still soft, still capable of loving in a world that so often hardens people. But there is a strange mercy in numbness, a temporary shelter, a dimly lit room where the pain lowers its voice and sits quietly in the corner instead of screaming. It feels like wrapping yourself in a thin blanket during a storm, not enough to stop the rain, not even enough to keep out the cold, but enough to let your body rest for a moment, enough to close your eyes without flinching at every crack of lightning.

And maybe that’s the cruelest part of being a suicide survivor… not just the grief, not just the anger, not just the longing that seeps into everything like dampness you can’t dry out. It’s the way your heart learns to survive in fragments, in cycles, in pieces that never quite fit back together the way they once did. Burning one hour, breaking the next, and then going eerily, blessedly quiet… just long enough to gather the strength to break all over again. It’s learning that survival isn’t a straight line, it’s a tide, a pulse, a series of waves that knock you down and then, somehow, leave you still breathing. And sometimes, in the quiet between those waves, you realize that living like this means carrying both the breaking and the breathing at the same time, forever learning how to float in water that will never stop being deep.

I know this will all hurt again later. I know the grief and the argument that awakened it will both be waiting for me when the quiet fades. But for now, I’m welcoming the numbness like an old friend, because it is the only thing standing between me and breaking completely.