But what if I confessed I think about death more often than “every now and then”? That it comes to mind a few times each week, sometimes just as passing thoughts, dark clouds that float by after a minute or two. Other times sticking around longer. An hour. Maybe two. And all I can do is contemplate what it would be like to die. To be in a state of death.

Is that normal?

And here’s the thing. I don’t think of it as an escape from pain.

I think of it as a fantasy.

In those times when the thought lingers, I find myself imagining death as a long walk in a vast cornfield to find the edge of a late-afternoon rainbow. It’s right after a summer rain, and there I am, barefoot and curious. Excited even. It’s all so clear in my mind. In this image, my feet squish on the wet soil, and my nostrils take in the musty, earthy aroma of damp cornstalks. I push through perfect rows of army green, my arms wet with the raindrops coming off the husks, and the only sounds I hear are my own gentle movements as I ghost through the field.

In this image, the sky in front of me is purple-black, the color of a punishing bruise, and holds within it the storm that just passed over. Behind me, the sky is cloudless, and the brilliant sun illuminates the rainbow toward which I’m walking. The rainbow arches at the intersection of these two opposite skies, between the light and the dark, between the storm and the calm. There is such a defined crispness to this rainbow that it is impossible for it to be anything but tangible.

I’ll be able to touch it. Seize it. I imagine it having a slightly spongy texture, as if made out of taffy that’s been stretched for miles.

In this fantasy, death occurs the moment I touch the rainbow. I dissolve into it, am absorbed by it, and I become all those colors, the entire spectrum, forever.

I don’t know why death occurs to me as such a beautiful thing, but this imagery appears in my mind each time I consider it, and it’s always the same. Maybe there’s so much guilt welled inside me that death represents a relief valve, something to take all that pressure away forever.

However, in my fantasy, I never allow myself to touch that candy rainbow. Even in my mind, I resist.

And now, sitting on this bathroom floor, staring at the two different-colored pills in the palm of my hand, my fantasy is to pour a few more from the vials and wash the lot of them down with that four-hundred-dollar whiskey, the top-shelf stuff. I want what Riley experienced, that beautiful drifting, a raft in the middle of a vast sea, the lightest of breezes carrying me slowly, softly, away. In this moment, I’m jealous of Riley. I envy him his death.

I think about it.