Flirting With Death
Sleeping has always been the closest I could come to dying. Like flirting with death and knowing that the control is with you. You don't hurt your loved ones, but you don't have to deal with how painful your life is and how much you never want to exist again. Every trip to the hospital to get a prescription leaves you excited, for yet another card that helps you drown in the darkness that is sleep. A darkness where your demons can't find you.
You thought if you ignored the parts of you that stuck out and made life hell for you, things would get better. But they say people only think the grass is greener on the other side when it's just greener where you are. And I learned this late. I learned this when I had to bade you a farewell that you never heard. A farewell that I couldn't deliver to you but hoped my spirit communicated the end of our journey and that you at least confirmed it. That you let me know you were letting go.
Life can come at you very fast. One day, you’re getting used to the misery you have for a life, and the next you’re learning how to accommodate someone else in it. You’re laughing. You’re happy. You’re letting someone in your space and getting used to it, but you’re constantly reminded that everything fades in the end, so you hold on as tightly as possible. Everything I’ve ever let go of have claw marks. You hope that this time will be different, but hope does what hope does best... leave you high and dry. A pit in your stomach knowing it will never be as you want it to.
That’s how you hoped your parents would match you in ways you wanted to be matched, and communicating that only showed you that you can open your head up for people to see what it’s like in there, but they will only choose to see what they will. And you won’t be able to do anything about it. That’s what they mean by control; how much of your life you spend, hoping and trying to change a fate that has been written against you. A fate you should accept and move away from because you have no control over it.
Some day you return to the house and there is no one to welcome you and cling to you like their life depends on you. There is no one to stare at you for hours and make you blush. There is no one to remind you to breathe when the water threatens to tip you over the edge. There is no one to ask you not to go over the ledge, because when your life ends, theirs does, too. There is no one to be a constant witness to your life so you drown and drown and drown in the darkness that the sedatives offer. You flirt with death and win time and again.
You flirt with death because you’re the one who creates yourself. You flirt with death because a person can only die once, and you died that first time and have now become immortal. You flirt with death because at the end of the day, all you wanted always found their way away from you. And if that isn’t proof of a death that has happened, what is?
