The song comes on while I am working and I have to set down what I am doing. This is not a figure of speech. It is a Tuesday afternoon in May, the kind of Tuesday that does not announce itself as significant, the light through the window where it always is at that hour, the same work on the screen that is there every day, and the algorithm that runs the streaming service I keep going in the background has decided, without knowing what it is deciding, that I need to hear Linkin Park. “One More Light.” The one about the kitchen chair. The one Chester Bennington wrote for a friend who died and then, less than two months after the album came out, sang at his own funeral, which is a detail I cannot stop thinking about even though thinking about it does not help.
I know the song. I have heard it many times before. But today, for reasons I cannot name except to say that the math has caught up with me in a new way, I hear the line about the kitchen and I have to stop. The work goes still in front of me. My hands come off the desk and into my lap. I let the song finish while I sit there, not crying exactly, but close enough that the distinction does not matter.
The line is this: In the kitchen, one more chair than you need. The song is about the aftermath. It is about the chair that remains at the table after someone is gone, the chair that no one has the heart to remove because removing it would mean admitting that the person who sat in it is not coming back. The chair is a monument. The chair is an accusation. The chair is the particular, unbearable math of a family that has had someone subtracted from it.
I know that chair. I have seen it in other people’s kitchens. I have seen the way it sits there, empty, and the way everyone in the room arranges themselves around the absence. But the reason I am sitting at my desk with the work abandoned in front of me and the song ending and the algorithm already queuing up whatever comes next, indifferent to what it has just done, is that I also know the other side of that chair. I know the chair from the perspective of the person who almost vacated it.
The number is 2301. That is how many days it has been since I last cut myself on purpose.
The counting starts when you stop. You do not plan to count. The counting is not a project you undertake with intention and a spreadsheet. It is just that you know the date, because the date is attached to an event that reorganized your life, and after the event you cannot help noticing the distance between that date and the current one. One day. Three days. A week. The numbers accumulate without your permission, the way all numbers accumulate when you are measuring distance from something you would rather not be measuring distance from at all.
The event itself is difficult to describe in a way that makes sense from the outside. This is true of most acts of self-harm. They happen in a logic that collapses as soon as you try to translate it into language that a person who has not been there can follow. From the outside, it is incomprehensible: why would someone do that to themselves, to their own body, to the skin they have to live in? From the inside, it is almost too comprehensible. It is the most straightforward thing in the world. The thinking has been leading to this conclusion for weeks or months or years, and the conclusion is elegant in its simplicity, and the act follows from the conclusion the way any action follows from a premise that has been accepted as true.
The inside pain had become too loud, too diffuse, too unlocatable, and the outside pain gave it a place to go. The cut was not an ending. It was a translation. It took something that had no shape and no address and gave it both. For a few minutes, the pain was in my arm and hand instead of everywhere else, and the specificity of it was a relief that I do not expect anyone to understand if they have not lived it.
But the cut was deep enough that someone noticed. Or I told someone. The details of that night are foggy in the way that details become foggy when your brain is doing the thing it does, the thing with a name, the thing that warps your perception of what is reasonable and what is not. What I remember is the aftermath: the emergency room, the social worker, the questions that had a particular weight to them, the kind of weight that lets you know, even through the fog, that the answers you give are going to determine where you sleep tonight and for many nights after.
New Ulm. The psychiatric ward. The locked door that closes behind you with a sound that is neither loud nor soft but simply final, the sound of a decision being made on your behalf because you have demonstrated, conclusively, that you cannot be trusted to make your own.
The chair in my mother’s kitchen is not empty. This is the thing the song makes me think about, sitting at my desk with the work gone quiet. It makes me think about the chair that is not empty because I am still in it. Or not in it literally. I do not live in my mother’s kitchen, I am forty-five years old, I have my own kitchen and my own chairs and my own mortgage. But in it in the way that matters. The chair that represents my presence in the lives of the people who love me. The chair that would have been the extra one, the one more than you need, the one that no one removes because removing it would mean admitting something that no one wants to admit.
My family would have been the family in the song. My mother, setting the table with one fewer plate. My father, learning to answer the question “how many children do you have?” in a way that does not require an asterisk. My sister, carrying the particular weight of being the one who is still here, the one who has to be enough because the other one is not coming back. Melissa, who would have been a widow at the age of forty, who would have had to explain to people, for the rest of her life, that her husband died by suicide, and who would have had to watch their faces do the particular rearrangement that faces do when that word is introduced into a conversation.
This is not hypothetical. This is not a morbid thought experiment I am conducting for the purposes of an essay. This is the outcome that was, for a specific period of my life, the most probable one. The math was not ambiguous. The trajectory was not unclear. I was moving toward an ending with the momentum of a person who had accepted the ending as inevitable, and the only question was when.
The song is about the people left behind. The people looking at the extra chair. The people asking themselves the questions the song asks: Who cares if one more light goes out? Well I do. But there is another version of the song. The version that does not get written because the person who would write it is the one who is gone. The version from the perspective of the person who almost left the chair empty and did not.
I did not. The number is 2301.
2301 days. That is six years and three months and some change. That is longer than the entire lifespan of a child who has learned to read. That is longer than the eighteen-month manic episode that ended with me describing a suicide plan to a social worker with the specificity of an engineer presenting project requirements. That is longer than the forty-five-day coma that almost finished the job my mind had started, the coma where my body lay open in an ICU while my mind traveled through basements and golden cities and empty train depots, chasing a thread that stretched across distances that should not have been survivable.
The number is an accumulation. It is not a recovery. Recovery implies a destination, a place you arrive at and unpack. The number is a series of individual days, each one decided separately, each one a negotiation between the part of me that wants to stay and the part of me that remembers, vividly, how much easier it was to not. Some of the days required enormous effort. Some of them required no effort at all, which is its own kind of danger because the days that require no effort are the days you stop paying attention, and the days you stop paying attention are the days the old logic can slip back in without your noticing.
Most of the days were ordinary. This is the thing about survival that the narratives do not capture. The narratives focus on the crisis and the intervention and the moment of decision, the dramatic turning point where everything changes. But survival is not dramatic. Survival is the accumulation of mornings. It is waking up and taking the pills and drinking the coffee and going to work and coming home and doing it again. It is the daily, unglamorous maintenance of a life that has been, at multiple points, a life that did not want to continue, and the maintenance does not feel like victory. It feels like routine. It feels like the particular tiredness of a person who has been carrying something heavy for so long that they have stopped noticing the weight.
The weight is still there. The number is the proof that I have been carrying it. But the number is also the proof that carrying it is possible, that the weight is not more than I can hold, that the days add up into weeks and months and years and that the accumulation itself becomes a reason to continue. I do not want to break the streak. This is a stupid reason to stay alive, and it is also the most honest one I have. The number is 2301, and I want to see what 2302 looks like, and then 2303, and then whatever comes after that.
The Linkin Park song is about a light going out. The metaphor is not subtle. A light, among millions of lights, extinguished. The question the song asks is: does it matter? Does anyone care if one light, among so many, stops shining?
The answer the song gives is I do. But the answer I give, sitting at my desk with the song over and the algorithm moving on, is different. The answer I give is that the light did not go out. It flickered. It dimmed. It came close, closer than anyone outside my head will ever know, closer than I know how to describe without resorting to language that feels inadequate the moment I write it down. But it did not go out. And the difference between almost and did is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind. It is the difference between a song about aftermath and a life that is still being lived.
I am still here. The chair in the kitchen is not extra. Melissa is in the other room, in our house, in our life, and she is not a widow. My mother does not have to answer the question differently. My sister does not have to carry the weight of being the only one left. The future that was, for a specific period of my life, the most probable future, did not arrive. Something else arrived instead. Something that looked, from the outside, a lot like the life I was already living, except that I was in it, and I stayed in it, and the days kept coming, and I kept showing up for them.
This is not a triumphant narrative. I do not feel triumphant. I feel tired, and grateful, and surprised, and wary, and a hundred other things that do not resolve into a single emotion. But I also feel something that I do not have a better word for than continued. I am a continuing event. A light that is still on. A chair that is still occupied. A number that is still climbing, one day at a time, toward a total I did not expect to reach and do not know what to do with except to note it, the way you note a weather pattern that defies the forecast.
- Tomorrow it will be 2302. The song is over. I get up from the desk. I go back to the day.
The counter is an app. It sits on my phone, one icon among many, indistinguishable from the weather app and the calendar app and the app that tells Melissa my location. It has no personality. It does not send notifications. It has no streaks or badges, and it does not congratulate me. It does not know what the date I gave it represents. It is the simplest piece of software I own: a text field for a date, a button, a result. The result is a number. The number is 2301.
Some people count days of sobriety. Some people count days since a diagnosis. Some people count days since a loss. I count days since I last cut myself, which is not a thing I talk about at parties, and not a thing I have talked about in an essay until now. But the app does not know what it is counting, and that is the appeal. The app has no opinion about self-harm. It has no opinion about psychiatric wards or locked doors or the particular weight of a social worker’s questions in an emergency room. It performs a subtraction. It returns an integer. The integer is larger than it used to be, and the fact that it is larger is, in the logic of the app, neither good nor bad. It is just math. The math says 2301.
The number lives in two places now. It lives in my head, the way the date of a death lives in the head of someone who has lost a person, except the death being tracked is my own and it did not happen. And it lives on my phone, in an app that does not care about it. The app is the backup. The app is the external validation. When the fog rolls in, when the brain does the thing it does, when I cannot trust my own count because I cannot trust my own anything, the app is there, doing the subtraction the same way it did yesterday, arriving at the same result plus one. The app cannot be gaslit. The app cannot be convinced by the old logic that the number is smaller than it is. The app just subtracts and displays, and the display says 2301, and the display is correct.
The counting is private, the way a lot of things about this disorder are private, not because I am ashamed but because the act of explaining requires a context that casual conversation does not provide. You cannot open an app on your phone and show someone the number and say “this is how many days since I hurt myself on purpose” without explaining why you were hurting yourself in the first place, and the explanation takes longer than a conversation at a party allows, and by the time you have finished explaining, the party has moved on to other topics and you are standing there with a phone and a number and a story and no one who asked for either.
But the number is real. The number is 2301. And the number means something even if the app that displays it does not know what it means. It means that I chose, on a specific day, to stop doing a specific thing, and that the choice held. It means that 2301 times in a row, I woke up and did not cut myself, which is a way of saying that I chose to stay, and that the choice was not automatic, and that the accumulation of those choices has become the architecture of a life that I was not supposed to have. The app does not know any of this. The app just subtracts. But I know, and the app is there when I need to check, and the distance between what the app knows and what I know is the distance between an integer and a life, which is to say it is not a distance at all.
Chester Bennington, lead singer of Linkin Park, died by suicide in July of 2017. He was forty-one. The song “One More Light” was released in May of the same year. He sang it at Chris Cornell’s funeral. Two months later, he was gone too. The song is about the aftermath of suicide, and then it became the aftermath of its own singer, which is a recursion that I try not to think about too hard because thinking about it too hard leads to places that are not useful for a person whose mind has already demonstrated that it knows the way to those places.
I think about him sometimes. Not in a parasocial way, not as though I knew him. I think about him the way I think about anyone whose brain produced extraordinary things and also produced the conditions for its own destruction. The way I think about David Foster Wallace. The way I think about Terry Davis. The way I think, if I am being honest, about myself. The difference is that I am still here and they are not, and the difference is not a difference of talent or will or worth. It is a difference of luck and timing and medication and the particular configuration of people who refused to let me go.
The song is about a light going out. Chester’s light went out. Chris Cornell’s light went out. Wallace’s light went out. Mine did not. And I do not know why, exactly, except to say that I had help. I had Melissa, who sat in a chair beside my bed for forty-five days while my body lay open and a machine breathed for me, and who sat in a different chair in a locked ward in New Ulm before that, and who has been sitting in chairs beside me for twenty-four years, refusing, with the particular stubbornness of a person who has decided something and will not be moved, to let me go. I had my parents. I had my sister. I had the social worker in the emergency room who asked the right questions. I had the psychiatrist in New Ulm who gave my brain a name. I had the medication, eventually, after years of not having it, after years of cycling through moods I could not name and episodes I could not predict, because no one had thought to look at the pattern and say this is not weather, this is a condition.
I had all of that. And I also had something else, something harder to name, something that is not a person or a pill. I had the stubbornness that I have written about elsewhere, the particular refusal to quit that kept me chipping away at a degree I took nearly ten years to finish and a renovation that took years to complete and a life that kept trying to end and that I kept, against every reasonable expectation, extending. The stubbornness is not pretty. It is not inspiring. It is the kind of stubbornness that makes you wear shorts in January in Minnesota because you have decided that winter does not get to dictate your wardrobe, and that same stubbornness, applied inward, is what keeps you alive when the logic of your own brain is telling you that the math does not work out, that the chair would not be missed, that the light going out would not matter in a sky of a million stars.
The song is wrong. Or not wrong: the song is honest, painfully honest, about what it feels like to be left behind. But the song is not my song. My song is the one that does not get written because the person who would write it is still here. My song is the one about the light that stayed on. The chair that is still occupied. The number that is still climbing. The family that does not have to learn to set the table with one fewer plate.
2301 days. I am sitting in my living room now. The desk is dark. The afternoon is behind me. The song is over, has been over for hours, but the thing it opened up is still open. This is how it works with the things that matter. They do not close when the stimulus ends. They stay open, and you sit with them, and eventually you write about them because writing is the only way you have found to give them a shape they can hold outside of your head.
Melissa is in the other room. She does not know I am writing this. She will read it when it is published, the way she reads everything I write, with the particular attention of a person who has lived through the events being described and is seeing them arranged into language for the first time. She will not be surprised by the content. She knows the number. She knows the date. She was there for the aftermath and the ward and the recovery and every day since. But she will read it and she will feel something, and I will not know what she feels unless she tells me, and she might not tell me, because some things are too close to be spoken aloud, and the distance between us on this subject is measured in the different ways we experienced the same events.
She was the one who would have had to remove the chair. She was the one who would have had to answer the questions. She was the one who would have had to learn to live in a house with a light that had gone out.
She does not have to. The number is 2301. I am still here. The chair is still occupied. The light is still on. And I am going to go into the other room now, where she is, and sit down in the chair that is not extra, and not say anything, because the saying has been done here, and the living is done there, and the distance between the two is the distance between an essay and a life, which is to say it is not a distance at all.
Quiet Mind, Loud Brain 
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