I would like to say that as I approached my car that night, keys out, eyes puffed half shut and blackened with mascara and the blows of countless invisible enemies, I was thinking of something other than suicide. I would like to say that I was thinking of my family, and my friends, of God and happy things and woodland creatures. I would like to say I could hear soothing background music and the voice of my dead grandfather telling me everything would be okay, a Hollywood phantasm of faith and good will. But instead I was thinking of various painless but effective ways of ending my life.

 Driving. All I wanted to do was drive. Rule number two in driver’s education, second only to do not swerve for any animals in the road except deer, was Do Not Drive While Highly Emotional. To demonstrate this fact, our driver’s ed instructor showed a video, "Blood on the Highway" or something like that, about a woman, eyes puffed half shut and blackened with mascara and the blows of countless invisible enemies, who got in her car and, unable to concentrate on the road ahead, was killed in a horrific collision of metal and plastic, bone and asphalt.

 But it’s not like that at all, really. Driving While Emotional is really quite easy, if you practice it. And I’ve practiced it. Get in, lock the doors, and move. Go. And no one can stop you.

 I unlocked the doors and got inside the car, still smelling of yesterday’s trip to McDonald’s and an old pink air freshener. Cinnaberry. Arranging my purse neatly on the floor so the ID could be easily reached—by me or someone else, just in case—I locked the doors and left. Destinationless.

 Radio blaring and heater on, I tried to sing in my mobile womb. I thought of the music for only a few seconds before I found my mouth moving on its own, having been tricked by the mind so it could turn itself to more serious matters.

 How could I do it? Bleach? The powdered kind is supposed to be painless. And my teeth would be white.

 Strange things crossed my mind. Pictures, mostly. Of the bottle of Prozac that sat on my dresser, unopened since October, five months earlier. Of the three phone calls I had gotten demanding to know when I was going to finish this project or that project, of the fourth phone call I had gotten from the girl who was supposed to help me with the project but didn’t, demanding to know why I was telling people I wished she would help.

 The Prozac. What about it? Twenty milliliters of powder in a snappy yellow and green tomb. How many would I have to take? How many had I already taken, since that week in November two years earlier that I stopped eating and woke up at five on a Thursday morning with every hair on my body standing on end, knowing I would never get everything done, and that I had failed?

 My parents. Convinced I’m going to be a best-selling author and buy them a house in Cape Cod with the profits from my first book. And a Jaguar with the second. My mother is depressed, too. But she takes Paxil, a pink and pretty Barbie of a drug. I inherited my nose and my depression from her. My dad is just oblivious.

 A gun, no chance of that.

 I expect you to lead the book discussion while I’m gone.

 Read this paper, let me know what you think.

 Can you edit this for next week? It’s only eighty pages. You can do it.

 I wouldn’t normally ask. But I can count on you.

 I trust you.

 My car drove itself for almost an hour without my intervention at all, to ugly Mansfield and pretty Pavonia, where a boy I used to be in love with told me we would be married some day. He’s long, long gone. But sitting in the parking lot of the church he promised me we’d be married in, my mouth still moving to songs I could barely even hear, I felt the need to turn around. To go to his house.
 He didn’t even live there anymore, had moved out months ago for an apartment in Cleveland near the medical school he excelled at, because med school is so much better than college, I would never want to go back there, not now that I’m out.

 I don’t see how you can stand it, he told me a few months into the new semester, as if we had not gone to college at all, but a labor camp in the heart of Germany.

 But I pointed my car in the direction of his Sullivan home, anyway, partially because it was the only other place I knew well enough to drive to, partially because I wanted to see it, whether he was in it or not, because I once knew the people inside.

 The long black stretches of road I covered to reach his house were littered with the carcasses of dead animals who had obviously fallen victim to the number one rule of driving as learned in driver’s ed. A car crash seemed out of the question. Too iffy. And that would leave me no time to write a note.

 Much to my mind’s annoyance, the radio kept on, distracting my mouth and clouding its thoughts. Vapors of death and ignominy were being muffled by happy pop music, or the reverse, and things were careening around inside my head, poisonous spikes on wheels, stabbing here and then there, all to the tune of Thin Lizzy’s "The Boys Are Back In Town."

 And so, ten minutes from the home of my former love, who had not loved me back, my mind superseded my mouth, and had my hand turn off the radio.

 Stopped at a light in front of the Sullivan Christian Church and a one-island gas station, I began to sob, uncontrollably, hiccuping, gagging. Cars passed me on either side as I sat, blocking traffic, a spectacle for the man pumping gas into his lackluster brown pickup truck, and I imagined them staring at me. And then I imagined them asking me to proofread their papers for class tomorrow, and my mouth, left slack with no radio, began to move again on its own as I punched the gas, lurching into the intersection just as the light turned red again:

 I don’t want to lead the book discussion I can’t read your paper now, I don’t want to, I don’t ever want to I don’t think I can write a best-selling novel   I just want to be left alone I don’t want you to trust me, don’t count on me, I want to be like everyone else   I’m only twenty-one  I don’t know anything   leave me alone   I don’t know anything   you help me, me I can’t do it I could never do it I don’t know why you thought I could because I can’t just leave me alone I just want to die  I just want to die--

I don’t want to die

 The last five words did not absorb into the car’s upholstery like the rest had, but ricocheted, bouncing off the compass, the speedometer, the ice scraper. It had been quieter than all the rest, but as forceful, as uncontrolled. I had gone from the stoplight to the train tracks without even realizing, and would have kept going if the red railroad crossing lights had not begun to flash. The gates went down before me. A train was coming.

 A train.

 It wasn’t too late. I could break through the gates easily and wait. The train wouldn’t have time to stop. I wouldn’t feel a thing. My picture would be hung in the student center and a scholarship would be given in my name, and I would never be counted on again.

 I revved the engine and inched forward.

 The bells and lights of the railroad crossing echoed those in my head, screaming, trying to get my attention, or divert it. Go. The Prozac, the papers, the responsibility, the trust, the house in Cape Cod and the Jaguar, all gone, crushed under the weight of a thousand-car train, if you just go.

 Instead I turned the radio on and watched the train pass, singing, not only with my mouth but my whole body, still shaking. And after the train was gone, I drove on, still singing, dry-eyed, to my friend’s house.

 All the lights were on when I pulled into the driveway except his; they had made it into a guest room, he told me, and there were clearly no guests present that night. The TV burned in the living room, and I could see his brothers around it, not really watching but absorbing. His mother sat in her broken black leather recliner, a fat cat in her lap. His father would be home in an hour from the factory, and they would all go to bed.

 I still knew the people in the house, as much as I thought I had forgotten them.

 When I drove back over the tracks on my way home there was no train and I passed without incident. I recalled, with a cold blue flush of fear and exhilaration, another video we had seen in driver’s ed of a car that had been placed on train tracks, empty of all human life save that of a crash test dummy, dressed in an electric blue dress. The train did not derail, as I had thought it would—was taking bets it would from the other kids, clearly missing the point—but kept going, connecting with the car just long enough to crumple it, and then sliding past, unperturbed, unstoppable.

 I think about the train now, about how easy it would have been to let it wreck me, leave me in a tangled knot of metal, plastic, bone and asphalt. It seems impossible that I would have allowed something like that to happen, or even thought it; but that night, when my mouth moved independently from my mind and my mind conspired against me, it seemed so right, so perfect. I was going to be immortalized. I was going to be free.

 I see the collision of the train and the car again and again, the effortless way the train brushes past the car, destroying it. But instead of the crash test dummy in the electric blue dress I see myself, hiccuping and gagging and waiting to be freed from the weight of my responsibilities by taking on the weight of a forty ton train.

 There is not one character in this story, but two: myself and the train. The roles are interchangeable. And it is always better to be the train, to intersect with the things that stand in your way just long enough to crumple them, to cast them aside. The role of the crash test dummy is a thankless one.

 But when the gates went down in front of the train, the roles, at least for one moment, an invisible second that even I did not feel, the roles were reversed. The car was on the tracks, even when it was behind the gate. And I left it quietly, locked the projects and the Prozac and the Cape Cod house in the trunk, and walked away.

 That night I was the train.