I want to die. There is no better way to start a discourse on death than confessing your lust over it. One of the symptoms of this illness would be a heart that continues to beat even when you pray for it to stop. You are not brave enough to make it stop yourself, nor are you brave enough to keep breathing. You ask yourself, what is it going to be? I feel like a foolish lover, heart bruising, legs running, lungs breathing, eyes crying. Why do I continue to run when we know the marathon has long been done for a cripple like me. I was five years old when I broke my grandmother’s favorite vase - she cries over the pieces on the ground as I stand and watch. Fourteen years later and I’m still standing over broken pieces, unsure of how to put them all together once again. My mother comes and admonishes the little girl and she sweeps away the mess and throws it into the trash. I pick up the pieces of me scattered on the floor with bleeding hands and the tears are being held back and I ask myself, are you going to throw them away as well? There is no use to keeping all these broken pieces. A heart this broken is beyond repair so why do I continue to live when death is the only thing I mumble in my prayers?
I was sixteen when I wrote a piece about my anger towards living a life lived in mediocrity. I quote, “I want to bleed like an open wound. I don’t want bruises. I want blood.” It was an angry declamation to the skies that I was done feeling like death when I am oozing with life. It was a poem of screams, it was a bruising of the sky. I lift my fist to the heavens and I dare God like a sinner with no shame. It was a shout into the void, the ripping of an old being and the birth of a new one. It was a revolution through words. My rebirth came with thunderous applause, of people complimenting my bravery, my talent, and my voice. However, that was a long, long, long time ago. For today, I do not know how to write anymore. I do not know how to make words sound beautiful when they are dripping with a longing - a longing for something so dark, a longing for death. I have completely given up on the art of writing that used to feel like air in my lungs. I cannot do it anymore. The headlines read: Poet Found Dead - Choked By Words She No Longer Knew How To Write.
However, that is only one of the reasons why I want to die. The list is long and the list is horrible. Maybe it is because I watched a marriage fall apart or maybe because my father is a horrible man. Maybe it is because my mother is sick and dying or maybe it is because my grandmother has already died. I cannot pinpoint the exact reason why I go to cemeteries and envy the dead. The point is, I cannot stand myself. I am disgusted by the very person I am and I cannot stand to live in this body anymore. It is a vessel in which I continue to sin, I continue to long, and I continue to cry. I cannot stand the shell of which I was born into, I want my soul to roam away, for the thread to break and my spirit to become a star in the cosmos or a ghost in the hallways. I do not want to live anymore.
I cry and cry and cry and people have grown tired of my tears. I beg for them to end it because my hands tremble whenever I try. One day, I collapse into the arms of a boy whom I mistakenly loved too much and he said, “You keep praying for death. Do you even know what happens beyond? Do you think everything will really end?”
We all live in fear because we are afraid to die. Our bodies were created to repel death’s lingering touches. Even when death crawls into our beds at night and tries to lure us with a kiss, we still find enough willpower to not kiss back. We still look both sides before crossing the road and our heart still skips a beat when we stand too close to an edge. We spend every minute of every day waging a war against death, but one day, we raise the white flag anyway. When life stops making love to us, starts calling less, and stops calling you ‘darling,’ we turn to his brother - we turn to death. We ask for one night to ease the pain, but you still use your last breath to beg for life to come back into your arms. We are all merely regretful lovers in the face of death.
We believe that death will free us. There is salvation in the decay, that is how we romanticize the tragedy of loss and of bittersweet endings. We all long for it all to end but we do not really know what the end truly is. Is death really the end? Will death really be the one to end it all and take us away from all the pain? Death has began resembling the man of our dreams. We think he will save us. However, there is no guarantee that the grass truly is greener on the other side. Is death truly the end or is it just another beginning?
If this is the case, what is a girl like me supposed to do? All I have ever yearned for is an escape from the overwhelming sadness of it all - an escape from everyone, an escape from myself, an escape from life itself. It is this question that keeps me planted to the ground rather than buried under it. I know that I lust over death like a man deprived of a woman’s soft touch, but to claim that there is no fear within me is to lie before a grave. But let’s be honest. I do not really want to die. I want to live.
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