Trigger warning: Body Dysmorphia, Suicide, Anxiety, Depression, Gore
A bottle rolled away as I stir, stretching my legs. I’m on the once cerulean but now a mucky brown-blue sofa. I can smell the sweat and the sick sweet stench of day-old alcohol. I check the time. It’s too late to take out the trash. Too late for anything. It threatens to take over again. The sense of hopelessness that has been chronic and all consuming. Mine to carry since birth, intensified in college when I lay around and watched three years pass as my friends slept around and fell in love and found newer, shinier models to replace old ones.
I try to think beyond the fog of my hangover. You know, there is a thin line between insane and successful. An artist is little different from a hospitalized schizophrenic. Both are obsessive, sharp, disillusioned and victims of their own brain, one just manages to use it differently. I see myself in the mirror across the room. Limp, thin hair, eyebags, braces, and folds upon folds of skin. More rolls than I could count. I close my eyes before I can look more closely.
I pull out my phone and hesitate. I don't know how to write anymore. What to write about. There is so much cynicism and so little knowledge and everyone is radicalized. Everyone and everything has ulterior motives. It's all ideology and power. Everything is a game of something more. That is why I don’t write anymore. Unawareness and waning talent coupled with lethargy, the individual meets the collective and renders me inane and redundant. Today however, I chose to try. To tell my story one last time.
To me the visual of a gun to my head and the flavor of blood in my mouth were as natural as breathing. I always thought about it, the finality, the relief. I was falling. I tried as much as I could. The gun was my best friend. A reminder that the end was in my control. I craved it more than smoke and drink. Nothing relieved me anymore. I was high strung and waiting. Waiting for someone to see. To unstring me. To set me free. No one came. So I decided to do the job myself. If you are reading this, I’m sorry.
What I realized some time ago was that I had not been alive for a long time. I was a corpse walking out of compulsion. A reaction to an instruction. I did not want to say bye. I did not want to melt into my bed. I am simply tired of trying. The inebriation only served to heighten what it was supposed to destroy. What a paradox. What rambling of an alcoholic. What desperation for relief where none was found.
I spent my life feeling too much and realized that there is nowhere to put all of it. Nowhere to let it rest while I untangle its mess, string by string. I look at the rickety plastic table in front of me and I wish I could take out my head and my heart and all of my frayed nerves and put it there for a little bit. All I wished to do was rest. Was that too much to ask?
Hope was dangerous. It kept me alive. Every small hopelessness therefore was a small chunk of my life broken off, each hopelessness a leach. I lost more and more and more every time I dared to hope for anything and failed abjectly. I failed as a human. I became wasted space.
I saw dead birds wherever I went. I saw the maggots on their skin and the feathers and blood wrapping the carcass. I saw the cat with bloody teeth licking herself clean. I felt the stench. The mildly oppressive sick scent of rot. Of death. It intrigued me. There was something beautiful about it. It was the sense of finality. Of an ultimatum. I saw them not as an ill omen; they were not signaling anything bad. All the bad that was meant to happen already had. I had lost all hope. They never scared me or disgusted me. They only reminded me of myself. My body, with its feathers and skin ripped apart, with blood on my carcass. The blood of my failures. Maggots infested my skin. I felt them crawling. They were always crawling, through my brain and my body. They have become familiar now. They can continue to feed on what it left behind.
I apologize to the person who finds my body. I doubt it will be pretty. It was not my parents’ fault. Their denial was one among many I never got used to. I always thought I was more than my body. At the end it was all I was reduced to. The very human failing of being alone. Of my mind not being enough to sustain me for lack of hope.
I have my gun in my hand. I want to smell the smoke and taste the flavor of blood in my mouth. I should not have been left in my own company too long. 21 years is too long.
- Hargun
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