Asturias (Spain), 2017

How do you express the feeling of dying? How do you escape from that mental and depressive prison? How do you give testimony of that dark and uncontrollable trance towards suicide? How do you give shape to that incredible tunnel? Can this be isolated, condensed into an image? Does suicide have a defined face, an archetypical behavior?

That afternoon, I was dying. I felt myself slowly entering a common hysteria. There was no one by my side, nor outside. Asturias had frozen in my head; it took the form of a cemetery. And I told myself that, at least, I could photograph myself in those moments, doing it in an arbitrary, compulsive, delirious way. The camera began to shoot me.

Any other suicide would leave behind a note, but I would leave images, digital memories, in my camera. Yes, I was going to die from loneliness, from the terror of silence. Yet, those shots made me come back to my senses. I found the window and thought about jumping. But the light, that tender winter light that I will never forget in my life, stopped me.

I found beauty in that window. And I could no longer jump, I could not cut my veins nor fill my stomach with pills. The light was my anchor. And these images are the reminder that I will never again think about committing suicide.

Charleen Capote