Every night, for years, I’d lay awake and wonder what it would be like to kill myself. More specifically, I’d visualize pressing the barrel of a .22 into the front of my skull. Most nights it was the only way I could fall asleep.

I’d never grown up around guns, despite having a father in the military. The first time I shot a gun I was 23 years old. It was in Boise Idaho, at private gun range. I don’t recall the specifics. The time of day, the place, the drills we did, the safety instructions. But I remember the weight of the gun. If anything, that’s what I remember the most. Even at a small caliber like a .22 has a weight to it.

And, late at night, when I can’t sleep, I think real hard about how that gun felt. I close my eyes and picture its short black frame. I think about that small tab on the side, the safety, that turned on the ‘kill mode’. I think about that timid excitement the first time I flicked it on.

I try to remember what it felt like to fire it. The sudden recoil - as if the gun was fighting back. As if it didn’t want to be fired or used or exist at all. I found that aspect only made the act more pleasurable.

I remember what it was like to hit the target. The loud clink of metal on metal. But in my fantasy, everything after the recoil is irrelevant. In fact, I rarely thought about firing the gun at all. Instead, I focused on the barrel. I remember how it stuck out just barely past the boxy frame of the gun’s body. I’d try to picture it perfectly. The exact dimensions: how far it jutted out, the circumference of the muzzle. In my fantasy, when I place the gun on my forehead, it’s cold and I try to concentrate on how my skin under the barrel would protrude to fill the hollow cylinder. I’ve never tried it in real life but I think it would leave a perfectly circular imprint. That is, If I decided to remove it. And some nights I would. I’d find that all I would need to release the stress is a quick press. A stamp of the barrel. Just to relieve the pressure - nothing too intense.

Some nights, however, required more… dedication. Some nights, I’d lay awake for hours with that hypothetical gun, that mental pre-meditated suicide, pressed deeply into my forehead. Very rarely, only in the most stressful of occasions, would I decide the trigger should be pulled. In those instances I was admitting defeat. After all, It was an act of defiance, fundamentally, to myself. An admittance that I was incapable of coping with my reality. So be it. Sometimes I’m not capable.

I’ve never owned a gun. I never plan to. I don’t plan to kill myself either, even when the fantasy of doing so seems more salient than the reality of making it through tomorrow. But I still re-live this fantasy, often nightly. It’s the only way I can fall asleep most of the time. The idea that if I really wanted to I could make everything, all the unhappiness that is existence, go away. But I don’t. Why? Perhaps because, for no other reason, than I would no longer be able to live out my nightly fantasy.