It was pretty weird...I was in a sporting goods store, buying a shotgun and fully intending to go home and use it. I'd even done some research to find the model with the shortest barrel possible, and I knew to use slugs rather than shot.

I knew how it would affect people, especially my daughter who was eight at the time, but everything felt so far away...like I knew it in an abstract way, but it couldn't quite reach me.

Suddenly, though, I thought about my roommate. He was gone, out of town, for two weeks, and he was starting school the day after he got back. I thought "He's going to come home, find out I'm dead, and he's going to have to find a new roommate right away while school is starting. That's going to really be a bitch." And I walked out in the middle of the sale without the gun.

I'm not sure why that affected me when the thought of my daughter growing up without a dad, or my own dad losing his child, didn't. My theory is that, because I was so numb myself, I couldn't relate to the powerful emotions they would feel. But being inconvenienced, having to deal with one more thing, life being a bitch...those were things I could still relate to. Either way, it saved my life.