HER DECISION

"Look me straight in the eye and tell me the next 40 years of my life won't be as bad as the last have been. Make me believe it!"

I can't believe what I see, she thought. I'm talking to a mirror. Me, Marcia, a reasonably intelligent, reasonably stable woman, is having a conversation with a damn mirror!

Marcia stepped back and faced her reflection, surprised to see the razor blade in her hand. How had it gotten there? Her eyes searched the face staring back at her, trying not to see the silver blade and wanting to see more than was there.

I'm a stranger to myself. An old face looking back at me. I seem to have come rudely and quickly through a reluctant passage into an unfamiliar vessel. Limp gray hair. Each hair is a story, and together they are a novel of sadness. My skin: evenly tanned, olive really. Mouth: nice mouth. She leaned over the sink for a closer look, then stopped as the image blurred. She remembered that another effect of aging had been to change her vision. But my eyes, she thought. Her eyes locked with those of the image. My once big beautiful brown eyes. Dull. Bloodshot. Ringed with black. Body -- how I hate it! Even when it was firm and trim, I found fault with it; but now! Shapeless, worn.

"So, it's come to this." She spoke aloud again, standing naked, turning the shiny blade over and over with trembling hands. She had always said she wanted death to come quickly, painlessly: a heart attack in her sleep, a sudden plane crash, a blood clot, and she wanted those who cared to say, "She never knew what hit her."

Suddenly she remembered 1967: When Annie put a gun to her head our junior year in college, she thought, we all said we could never take our own lives; but if we did, we'd use pills. Painless. Yet here I am, considering ending my life in a slow and painful way. All I planned to do was change the blade in my razor. Now I'm thinking of cutting into my own flesh, watching my life slip away.

"What a mess for someone to clean!" she heard a voice say. How typical of me to think that, she thought. Ever the housewife; ever the martyr. Have I ever faced a situation selfishly? Has it ever mattered?

Marcia saw a vision of her body, pale and stiff, rudely exposed on the cold, hard steel table, looking not as asleep, but not really dead, only as suspended in time. She heard a scream inside her head. Look at that stomach, she thought. And how translucent my skin is! God, I look worse dead than I do alive! How embarrassing!

She felt a shudder convulse through her body, as though an icy draft had entered the small room. With a sigh, she placed the blade in the razor and positioned it neatly on the shelf.

A quick, last glance in the mirror, a flick of the light switch, and Marcia left the room.