[ WP ] You are functionally immortal : you can die but instantly come back to life . Over the many , many years you 've become jaded and bored , and now dying is the only thing that gives you any sort of rush anymore . You 're about to attempt your most elaborate and thrilling death yet .

Cigarettes. Alcohol. Cocaine. Meth. Heroin. All of them were nice, for a while. They hooked me, reeled me in, and destroyed me, each in turn, and each in it's own special way. Pretty standard stuff, to be honest. Lung cancer metastasized to the brain. Drove into a tree. Drove off of a cliff, into a tree. Jumped off of a cliff. Fell out of a tree. You get the idea. 
 
 Addiction has run through my family for generations, back to at least the Civil War, where one of my god forsaken kinsman got himself riled up on whiskey and Indian Tobacco, banged a slave girl, and got himself shot running from that girl's master. Civil, indeed. 
 
 But here I am, a product of those same genetic predispositions and some interesting mutations, standing on the railing that would normally block rational folks from falling into this industrial metal shredder, but which would serve as the performing arts stage of my latest indulgence. 
 
 You see, at the time, those previous addictions felt like their own individual projects. I had learned about my *condition* as a child, when I had been told by the doctor `` Do n't ever eat shellfish. You could die.'' Well, shit, if you put a big red button in front of a kid and tell him not to press it, what's the little bastard going to do? 
 
 After waking up a few hours later, with the remainders of the neighbor's shrimp cocktail platter scattered around my tree house, and the reverberating pulse of adrenaline in my heart, I remembered the feelings I had felt before blacking out. 
 
 The waves of excitement, and anxiety, of fear, and outright panic breaking as the tide of calmness rose around me, and an overwhelming sense of peace and happiness carried me, as if floating on my back in the sea, to sleep. 
 
 There's never another one quite like your first. Kiss. Car. Drink. Fuck. You know what I mean. It's an experience that you relish, embellishing the details and inflating the memory to proportions that simply ca n't be matched in reality. You chase and chase, and when you think you've finally caught it, you end up with water in your hands, leaking eternally, as successive attempts to attain that glorious moment fade. 
 
 It was never about the feeling that these drugs gave me. It was never about how my lifestyle made me feel. Hell, it was n't even about dying. It has always been about that chase. Chasing, and chasing, and chasing. 
 
 Looking down into this machine of metal-munching mayhem, it's a sobering feeling, knowing that the agony, the feeling of being grinded into red mush, and waking up to remember exactly how every millisecond of that feels, is going to be a lasting mental scar of my most recent failure. 
 
 Because as close as this will get me, that feeling will still just be water in my hands.
