When I was a very young child, there was a bookcase in the corner of our living room. It wasn’t a very big bookcase – my parents were readers, but not particularly bookish. There was one book there called “Those Who Are About to Die”. Its cover contained a painting of a woman, sitting on the ground. There were ropes around her ankles, and someone was fixing a rope to her left wrist. The other wrist was already roped. Each rope ran to a harness, and the harnesses were attached to very large, very strong-looking horses. I was fascinated by this book cover, even though I was maybe only three years old. I asked my mother what was happening here, why was the man tying the woman to the horses. She told me that it was a picture of the Roman arena, the Colosseum, and that, once the ropes were tied, the man would whip the horses and the woman would be torn apart. Not a subtle woman, my mother.
I still remember the horror I felt upon hearing this story. I looked again at the woman in the painting. I must have spent hours and hours looking at her. She represented the first inkling in my child’s mind that the world might be a place where terrible things could happen.

I left the flat a couple of hours later. By that time, we’d gotten past all the sadness, and we spent the time laughing and joking and reminiscing. It was like old times, but eventually I had to go home. Somewhere along the way I’d met someone else, started building a life, bought a house, and got committed. She got committed too, but in a very different way.
This all happened, as I said, on a Saturday. She died on the Sunday. At some point, late at night, she gathered together all the pills she would need and fed them to herself, one by one, just as the voices told her to. There was no call, no text message. She didn’t leave a note. She was just gone.
And afterwards, when the funeral was done, and the gravestone was carved with her name and the dates that circumscribed her pitifully short life, when grief had washed out my eyes with its acid tears, I found myself in my own private Colosseum. I was the one sitting helpless in the sand. I was the one the Roman soldier was securing to the horses. On one side my wrist and ankle were bound, not with ropes, but with the words I said that day: I know, someday, you’ll go. I know it, and I’d do anything to stop it from happening. But I can’t. On the other, I was bound with the words I should have said: Don’t go! Stay with me. I’ll help you. I’ll be here for you. I’ll never give up on you. Don’t go. Stay. Please, stay.
I can still see the face of the woman in the painting; every detail of it is perfectly preserved in my mind. It was a look of anguish and resignation, a look of a person who knew she was doomed. I saw that same look that Saturday, when she was telling me about the voices. I just didn’t recognize it then.
And now, when I lie down in the silence of the night, I can almost feel that faceless Roman tightening the cord around my wrist. I know that soon he’ll stand up and crack his whip, and those huge horses will start to draw away apart. Some nights, they pull hard.