I’m not here to romanticise suicide or the selfish acts thereof.
I’m not here to undermine the overwhelming darkness of loneliness at 23:07 on a Friday night. I can’t describe to you what a countless number of broken hearts and lost souls encountered when on the very edge of suicidal thoughts, tendencies, and lastly actions.
But I do know this, music truly saved my life.
My week started off as a weekend in Cape Town that was a magical bliss of soundscapes and exploration, met by a 26 hour flight to Montreal that whirled me into the unopened iTunes playlists lying so dormant on my computer.
Local bands, street buskers, and the cancelled Ben Frost show at the La Sala Rossa was almost euphoric (to say the least).
But I’m back in Joburg for no less than a few hours and depression hits harder than the turn up on a Bobby Shmurda single.
And these thoughts are escalating, and my breathing is heavy, and my vision is blurry, and my heart is hurting and I’m fading back into old habits, searching for the things my psychiatrist said I should rid off but I never took that to heart and the only thing that makes sense is my good friend Oleksiy’s suitably apt music project Endless Melancholy.
His music has this ethereal sense of understanding me whenever I need it to, which is almost all the time but the melodies fade in and out of focus but never quite leave me until I wake up in pain, with tubes down my throat and I’m unaware of what transpired the night before but I remember “Your Are The Moonlight” by Endless Melancholy as it still rings so vividly in my mind.
They found me in my room, everyone trying to sleep while my music, angelic as it may be, was just turned on too loud; and my spaghetti-like body slumped halfway over my bed and hanging to the floor wasn’t really something you’d want to see when requesting that the music be turned lower.
Not about to pen down what happened or why but one thing remained, music saved my life.
In the mini-rehabilitation phase that followed over the weekend, I was warmly embraced by the sounds, words, and experience’s of Nic Gonzales’ solo offering Raptors & Remnants.
Short soundcloud snippets and exclusively sent tracks sent to me months ago have never meant as much to me as they did now, even after having used many of these same sounds as a score to one of my short films.
Inspired, somewhat by the music that saved my life, I saw it only fit to create, as an exploration and experiential journey as to what really happened that weekend, a collection of sounds and recordings that I may or may not share with the world. This creating process in some fucked up way helped me heal, helped me deal, and might I add, helped me even.
You can find this collection of sounds somewhere on the internet.
I’m not entirely glad to be alive, but don’t get me wrong – the world still wants something from me.
Whether to break me further or to love and hold me, the answers to this I don’t know but who ever does?
I’m still left feeling like my words are shitty, my images are bland, and my body weak; but I am aware that this isn’t yet the conclusion.
