Finale

Laid here with little left to live for, I wonder how people discover their thing: whatever it is that compels them to grasp onto life, even if it fleetingly slips through their fingers from time-to-time.

I won’t deny that I do have things that I could grasp onto. I just simply find it pointless— one could say hopeless, a relentless need to deny myself of pleasure in exchange for a never-ending pain. Trading my support system for cyclical solitude, or a solid career for a penniless life. Give up any academic pursuit for a minuet mind— typing away the remains of my existence in exchange for a peaceful, closeted death.

Pain exists on two levels: one that, at most, takes days to fade away. And then, there's the kind that ensnares you, dragging you into the earth's depths, burying you under oppressive layers of suffocating dirt until darkness becomes your entire world. Now, as much as I hate run-on sentences, that one was worth it. Who can resist the urge to write a run-on sentence when it so closely describes the run-on pain? Just bear with me.

Waking up to the disaster inside of me is far from pleasant. It’s even worse having to feel my feet against the cold ground, expecting my heels to move as though they have the strength to hold the structure of my being.

It’s an awful self-demand that I expect of myself, and an absolute hell when I fail to live up to it. For some godforsaken reason, my failure to live up to my potential comes with a pain-ridden avalanche of shame.

I am not enough to be happy, I tell myself.

I am not enough to be in love,

I am not enough to be alive,

I am not enough to be human,

I am not enough to be, I remind myself.

I'm the carcass of a human being, using every crumb of strength left in me to run away from the emptiness of life, yet I fail every time. Still, I’d much rather end this altogether, and you expect me to what— actually live? I’m holding mere fragments of myself as tightly as I can, and yet the weakness of my very bones betray me. Newton didn’t have to prove gravity existed— just take one look at the horrendous bags under my eyes! For heaven's sake, I wish it didn’t exist.

Maybe that’s the awful force that drags me down, or maybe it’s the self-destructive cycle I fail to escape. Maybe it’s some weird imbalance in my brain chemistry, or the trauma! Maybe it's one of the myriad of superficial, half-thought ideas explaining off the emptiness inside of me. They circulate like a virus through the superficial world we’d like to call home.

Yes, we’d love to call the world our earth, and its so-called society our sanctuary. Now, we’d spend a lifetime chasing after what we’d like to call home, finding peace in whatever is at our disposal and ravishing in the idea that peace is attainable— as though we haven’t spent millenniums trying to, failing to and dying with the knowledge that peace hasn’t yet been attained. And despite all this, we live on. More accurately, you live on.

I used to think that everyone felt the way I did. I mean, I put my feelings into words and people respond in a way that insinuates some level of reciprocity. But surely enough, the loneliness creeps back in and reminds me— although you may understand, it doesn’t change the fact that I am burdened by myself everyday: the massive, jumbled-up, indistinguishable ball of pain.. rolling around as though I know what to do and where to go.

I just don’t know what to do with myself anymore.

I’d hope that the death I crave would be peaceful, because how could it not be? I would be ridding myself of whatever it is that compels me to self-destruct and self-harm. I’d be craving my own finale.

And that's all I need now. For the pain, the burden and the shame. I just need my own finale.