The Story of My Death
This is the story of how I died.
I was raised to question, to find my own answers in life. Perhaps my parents noticed my natural curiosity in life, and chose to foster that, rather than stifling my growth with simply accepting what they believed as fact. Perhaps they thought it to be the best way to raise a child. It was from that spirit of discovery that my journey to my own end began, and the first thread was weaved.
In school, I had a teacher that fostered that ideal in her students, encouraging all of us to seek our own answers. Unknowingly to myself at the time, another thread was binding me to the path that would come. I began to pull away from those around me, into self-imposed isolation. Though slow at first, that isolation would eventually consume me. Of particular interest to me at the time, was the notion of God and religion, and that of humanity. Over that year, I questioned the world around me, and the ideas that people believe in. I began to reject the idea of religion, of God, as a wasted byproduct of humanity’s history. Science could explain anything religion and mysticism could, and I wondered how anybody couldn’t see that. I began to see humanity as a cesspool, incapable of doing anything but leading ourselves to our own damnation. Wherever I looked, I saw the problems of the world, and little being done to fix them.
As my childhood innocence fell away, I began to believe more and more that not only would my species destroy itself, but I hoped that it would. My disgust with humanity wished to see it dead and dying long before we ever left this planet for others. That our demons would at least be confined to Earth was the greatest gift I felt humanity could do for the universe.
After awhile, as cynicism and pessimism mounted, I chose to withdraw myself from school. Not officially, but simply by refusing to go. Refusing to surround myself with those I had come to dislike so intensely. It wasn’t as though I didn’t have friends. There were a few, but in most cases, they were more like casual acquaintances whom I’d briefly interact with, fulfilling my still human desire for companionship and conversation, however small. Given that I had no problem transferring those relationships to strictly through a computer, that desire was indeed small. My hermitage had begun, and the threads were weaving ever stronger.
I underwent chest surgery at this time, while the recovery period lasted far longer than expected, a fact I up played significantly to further isolate myself from the world outside my room. Eventually it would lead to my parents enrolling me in a school where I would only attend for several hours a week. More threads.
It was during this recovery period that I met her. She who would save me. She who would consume me. She who would destroy me. Words can never do justice to all that she has been to me, all she still is to me, but I can try and tell the tale as best as they will allow. Her name was Summer. We met one night in a chat room, the impersonal medium of text being my only desired method of communication with others. Immediately, I felt something different about her, at least, as well as you can feel upon first meeting someone as such. I made a note to message her, sensing something more in her than I felt towards the rest of the species. And so we started our journey together.
At that point in my life, I always held myself back. I never was invested in others, always standing back, and wearing the suit of armor I had made for myself. I made it a matter of personal pride to remark how I cared for no-one. I looked down on people. She changed that.
Shortly after we started talking, she was the one person I felt equal to, that I could relate with. At first, I had hoped to retreat fully from the world upon meeting her, encouraging her to believe as I did, as a protégé of sorts, and freeing myself of the guilt that would come from abandoning humanity to itself. She understood my anger and disappointment with the world, and sympathized with me. She never agreed, though. Where I could see no point in feeding the hungry, and healing the sick if they would only be that way again tomorrow, she was the opposite. ‘Do good where you can,’ she’d say, ‘help those who you are able.’ At the time, I thought she was naive, and more than a little crazy, but it’s funny how time and life can change someone.
The months rolled by. I began to have a real friend again, even if she was thousands of miles away. Through her, I met a group like us, social misfits who didn’t fit into societies neat little roles. We weren’t connected by much beyond that, and our shared chat room where we would come together. We became like a family to each other. We all had our demons, demons we didn’t try and hide. In truth, we were all wrecks in our own way, drifting through life and killing ourselves slowly. Somehow, by accepting each other for who we were, flaws and all, we were began to accept ourselves, as well. For the first time since isolating myself from the world, I began to have a sense of home, of family again. My parents had become.. passing figures in my life, pushed into the background in lieu of a world I was convinced I had chosen and desired.
Summer wasn’t exactly the model of a healthy human being. Between her own vast self-destructive habits, disease, and extreme susceptibility to finding herself injured, she had a lot working against her. While I wish I could her problems stopped there, they didn’t. I’m not sure I can honestly remember all the things that went wrong in her life while I knew her, and before.
When I first learned of the problems in her life, well, I don’t really know what I did. I didn’t care for others then, or at least, I still claimed not to, and I was completely unprepared for how to be a friend to someone who was hurting. In time, I would learn how to make her smile, how to brighten her day and provide whatever comfort an emotional robot is able.
Eventually, those walls started to come down. Brick by brick, just being her friend and wishing her the best, opened the blocks I had placed so fervently down. The armor melted away, and I was at a loss. Suddenly where there had been nothing before, there was feeling again. I began to not merely intellectualize my feelings, but I began to *feel* them. Slowly but surely, the world gained a vibrancy it had been lacking, with Summer at the center of it. Her happiness was enough to lift me out of anything, and her sadness had me crying right there with her.
As strange as it was to be able to say I cared for another, what happened next was even further from familiar for me.
“I love you.”
“What? You told me you didn’t even know what love was, how can you love me?”
“Well, according to the dictionary, I do...”
And just like that, this girl I had never seen in person, never heard her voice, had helped me to reconnect with something I had tried to lock away forever. She who had shown me nothing but kindness and compassion since I had known her. The first girl I ever had the courage to tell how I felt to. The first girl I’d ever felt more than a fleeting crush for.
And I invoke Webster.
Unsurprisingly, she laughed at me. Surprisingly, it worked. At least, it did eventually. After several months of trying to convince her, she relented. Not that she didn’t return the feelings, but rather, I think she was afraid of what it would mean, afraid of what she saw, as my eventual departure from her life. My utter lack of grace in telling her how I felt probably didn’t help things either.
The extent in which we understood each other scared me a little, and excited me more. With a few words we could make everything ok for the other, lift away the troubles of the world. Within seconds of saying hello to one another, we were able to tell if there was something wrong. That’s not the sort of thing that happens everyday, let alone simply by reading words on a screen. Though we had never seen one another, heard or touched each other, we had a bond with the other. I don’t claim to understand it, but I can’t deny it.
It was the most beautiful, the happiest time of my life. I believed that our feelings alone would be enough to make everything in our lives ok, that we could weather any storm as long as we held onto each other. Looking back, I suppose I had unrealistic expectations for us. Perhaps I went astray simply by having expectations. Regardless, that initial euphoria wore off far too soon, coming face to face with the reality of our lives, such as they were.
I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking at the time. I was fifteen, in love, and learning to crawl again in regards to my emotions and the human condition. Then again, that’s probably exactly why I did what I did.
Drawing upon my immense reserves of emotional strength I had built up inside myself, I vowed to be her shield against the world, as much as I could. When she fell, I would be there to catch her. When she was hurt, to tend to her words. I became her shoulder to cry on, her ear to whisper in. And there was much of all in the days and months to come.
I asked nothing in return for all of this. I was happy to help shoulder the burden of one I loved so dearly, happy to carry away all the pain I could if it even had a chance to brighten her day. There was no limit to how far I would go for her. The threads wove even tighter.
Eventually the months took their toll on me, and I felt the weight of her hurt sinking into my heart. The deeper I tried to draw it out of her, the more rushed in to fill the void. It seemed as though the world was trying to destroy us.
I spoke less and less of myself, and began to grow withdrawn again. In my recklessly selfless attempts to heal her, I didn’t wish to overburden her through worry of myself. The pain that grew deeper in my heart by the day was hidden from her, hidden from everyone. I told myself I could handle it, that I’d be ok. That my reserves were deep enough, that I didn’t have to let her suffer to save myself.
Eventually, it reached a point where I couldn’t deny the lie I was telling myself. I was worse off than I’d ever been in my life, and I knew that if I kept on it would only continue down this dark road I’d led myself upon, and death was my most likely end. The thing was, I didn’t trust anyone but myself to be able to help her. She didn’t have much to live for, and was taking medication for another of life’s cruel jokes thrown at her. I thought I was the only thing that could keep her going. So I made my promise to her.
“I will make your life better, or I will die trying.”
I had been given my chance to break free of the threads that bound me, and I had laughed in the face of it all. I loved her too damn much for there to be any other way. When I made that silent promise to her, I would never have expected both to come true.
What transpired over that next year is a blur, a blur which has left me irrevocably changed. Piecing together what happened then has been a long and slow process, one where many memories have been lost, much still hidden from me, locked away in the deepest recesses to protect me. I lost my mind, I lost reality, and I lost myself. The life that I had known was shattered, sacrificed on the altar of love, and eventually resurrected in it’s changed form.
I sank into a depression that had no end. Depression gave way to self-abandonment. Where before I longed for death, I no longer cared what happened to me. Death? Life? What did it matter, so long as it was somehow different. Emotions fell away. I longed to feel misery, some small measure of darkness in the void my life had become. I remember punching at walls, testing the waters of my emotion, trying to see if there was anything there. And as soon as I’d start, it was over. There was no anger coming, no sadness. Nothing but the slight numbing of my knuckles.
The hardest part of that, though, was when I could know longer feel the love I felt for her. It lasted the longest of all my feelings, growing ever weaker until it finally faded. But when it did fade, I was left with but a memory of why I I was doing what I was. Until one day, that memory too, would fade.
And still, I pressed on.
Disassociation grew. I think that there was some part of me, some self-preservation instinct that refused to go down quietly that was responsible for this. It locked me away from my own choices, protecting me from my own self-destructive path. It came on mild at first, washing away memories of unpleasant conversations and the pain I was still harboring for her. Yet as I pressed forward, it grew.
Eventually, I would not be able to tell my dreams from my waking states. The two intertwined and became one. I lost my memory of the time, and then my past. While before I at least had the pleasant nostalgia of my youth, and better times with her to retreat to, now I had nothing, nothing but the horror of my life as I had made it.
My senses numbed, everything lost it’s vibrancy. Life became like a shadow world, deprived of all that actually gave it life. My mind fell apart, unable to do anything but go through the basic motions of the day at the slowest possible speed.
And still, I pressed on.
I heard things that weren’t there. Or at least, I don’t really think they were. By this point, what was real and what wasn’t had become so hard to distinguish that it’s something of a crapshoot.
I remember going to the doctor once, though the reason escapes me. Along the lines, tests were done to address the increasing pains inside my body. There wasn’t any medical reason that could be found, but my body was shutting down. Slowly but surely, my organs were just.. turning off.
My body began to rebel. As if trying to sway me, to push me away from the path I was on, it would give out on me. A selective catatonia, if you will. Sometimes I would merely lose my ability to move my legs, and resort to crawling around or laying helpless on the ground. Sometimes I’d fall down stairs, and lay at the bottom wondering why I should get back up. And then, sometimes my whole body would refuse to move, where even moving my eyes took the entirety of my will to accomplish. There was something inside me telling me that it was time to return to myself, to tend my own wounds.
And still, I pressed on.
Eventually, in the midst of the haze and confusion that my life had become, I finally realized where I was, and where I was going. I remembered the promise that had led me to that moment, and the thousands of times I continued forward when every instinct in my body was yelling at me to turn around. I realized I had become so lost in myself, so trapped by what I created, that I had been unable to fulfill my promise. I’d been so ravaged by what I put myself through, that I’d forgotten everything. But I remembered then.
I remembered my promise. I didn’t know why I’d made it, not anymore. Nor did I remember what things like love even were. I didn’t know much of anything, other than this promise I made, and the knowledge that I had lost sight of it.
So I pressed on.
In my glimmer of consciousness, I had felt the weight of what I had done to myself, felt the changes I had inflicted. I knew there was no going back, that I had come too far. A thought came at me from the void. In all my life, I’ve never felt so strongly as I did on this one thing.
I am going to die.
That thought permeated my entire being. I knew it, I breathed it. The end to my eternity of nothingness was just around the corner. I reveled in the idea, as much as is possible for one such as that. Finally, what I had longed for, to be free of this self-imposed hell, would be upon me. The truth was, at that point, I already considered myself dead, and had for what had felt like an eternity, but then, in an eternity, it all feels so long. Or perhaps I should say, I considered myself the undead. I was alive, but only physically, and even that was growing weaker by the day. Soon, that last flame would die out, and my body would finally give me rest.
I never had any hopes or dreams that anything would happen to me when the moment of final death came to me. I expected nothingness. I couldn’t have cared less, though, as I’d *lived* nothingness, and there was no way that being fully dead in it could be any worse.
So I pressed on.
In the name of a promise I could barely recall, I pressed on. In the name of a word whose meaning I had forgotten, I pressed on. In the vaguest of memories for one who had once mattered so dearly, I pressed on. I wrote my final goodbyes to this world, to those who had known me. Provided words that I hoped they’d understand, that could explain in some way why I was lost to this world.
I came back into her life, though how long we had been apart I had no idea. I couldn’t escape her, for she was always in my dreams, always in my head, and she was as real to me there as she ever was. I apologized for leaving, and told her I would stay as long as I could. I wanted to give her as much as I possibly could before I shuffled off this mortal coil completely, to give her a chance at the better life I always knew she deserved. That last remnant of strength that I held inside me, I was laying with the rest upon the altar of love.
“I’ve found someone else. I’m sorry.”
Even lost in the void as I was, I felt it hit. It was done, then. I was no longer needed, a remnant of a life she had left behind somewhere when I had left myself behind. I didn’t blame her. How could I? Even if I didn’t still love her so deeply-- I knew that somewhere, somehow, I loved her-- even if I didn’t want only her happiness, she was right. I had lost myself, and she’d lost me when that happened. Now that I finally found myself again, she had already found her own measure of happiness, one that wouldn’t leave her all too soon.
It wasn’t long before we stopped speaking entirely. I suppose there wasn’t much left to say at that point. I wasn’t the person she had loved anymore, and she couldn’t be the person I had loved. Still loved.
So this is it, huh? Hell, might as well go down swinging.
I turned that one, final spark inwards. That spark that love had spared, hidden away in the deepest place inside me, and let it lose upon myself. I don’t really know what I was expecting, to be honest. I suppose I wanted to try and give life one last hurrah, soak in whatever small measure of happiness and beauty I could in what fleeting time I had. I knew I couldn’t ever go back-- that world was gone. I know, I destroyed it.
Somehow, that spark took hold. It set off a chain reaction in me, and soon, life. With every breath I took, I was more alive than the last. I was experiencing the world for the first time. Soon, emotions. And not just misery and depression, but real joy. Laughter from my soul. I reached out to everything I could, everything I had wanted to do but had forsaken.
I made friends. People I could see, face to face. I got outside. Spirituality took root. Meditation. Horseback riding. Courting, dating, relationships-- outside this electronic box. Every step I took was one step closer to my salvation. The humble spark had grown to become an inferno.
I started to live my life.
But I’m not the same person I was. Not by a long shot. Oh, sure, there are similarities. If you don’t look that hard, or never saw both sides, you might never notice. But a simple glance beneath the surface will say otherwise. I care. I love. Cynicism has been replaced by hope, pessimism with optimism. Anger, with love. Everything that had been good in Summer, I’ve made a point to hold within me. She was the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, and I wanted to honor that by bringing that beauty she had shown me into the world around me. Of course, that wasn’t really that hard to do.. somewhere in that process, who she was, and who I am, merged.
That life I led before.. has long seemed like another person. That I’m the spiritual successor to someone who I know a lot about, but never really knew. As time has gone by, I’ve been able to see the line of who he was, and who I am, and how that has stayed the same throughout. I’ve also slowly begun to unlock our memories, hidden as they were. With each one, understanding a little more of how I’ve come to find myself here, how he found himself where he did.
I’ve also come to the belief that what happened then, everything in my life led to. Not merely how our lives always lead us to this moment here and now, but when I look back, I can see a chain stretching, countless tiny links ensuring that the pattern play out as it was supposed to, as it still is. In another life, I suppose I’d chalk it up to coincidence, or my mind making up what it wants to see. But he led me here, and I have seen too much proof of the pattern to believe in anything else.
This is the story of how I was born.
I was raised to question, to find my own answers in life. Perhaps my parents noticed my natural curiosity in life, and chose to foster that, rather than stifling my growth with simply accepting what they believed as fact. Perhaps they thought it to be the best way to raise a child. It was from that spirit of discovery that my journey to my own end began, and the first thread was weaved.
In school, I had a teacher that fostered that ideal in her students, encouraging all of us to seek our own answers. Unknowingly to myself at the time, another thread was binding me to the path that would come. I began to pull away from those around me, into self-imposed isolation. Though slow at first, that isolation would eventually consume me. Of particular interest to me at the time, was the notion of God and religion, and that of humanity. Over that year, I questioned the world around me, and the ideas that people believe in. I began to reject the idea of religion, of God, as a wasted byproduct of humanity’s history. Science could explain anything religion and mysticism could, and I wondered how anybody couldn’t see that. I began to see humanity as a cesspool, incapable of doing anything but leading ourselves to our own damnation. Wherever I looked, I saw the problems of the world, and little being done to fix them.
As my childhood innocence fell away, I began to believe more and more that not only would my species destroy itself, but I hoped that it would. My disgust with humanity wished to see it dead and dying long before we ever left this planet for others. That our demons would at least be confined to Earth was the greatest gift I felt humanity could do for the universe.
After awhile, as cynicism and pessimism mounted, I chose to withdraw myself from school. Not officially, but simply by refusing to go. Refusing to surround myself with those I had come to dislike so intensely. It wasn’t as though I didn’t have friends. There were a few, but in most cases, they were more like casual acquaintances whom I’d briefly interact with, fulfilling my still human desire for companionship and conversation, however small. Given that I had no problem transferring those relationships to strictly through a computer, that desire was indeed small. My hermitage had begun, and the threads were weaving ever stronger.
I underwent chest surgery at this time, while the recovery period lasted far longer than expected, a fact I up played significantly to further isolate myself from the world outside my room. Eventually it would lead to my parents enrolling me in a school where I would only attend for several hours a week. More threads.
It was during this recovery period that I met her. She who would save me. She who would consume me. She who would destroy me. Words can never do justice to all that she has been to me, all she still is to me, but I can try and tell the tale as best as they will allow. Her name was Summer. We met one night in a chat room, the impersonal medium of text being my only desired method of communication with others. Immediately, I felt something different about her, at least, as well as you can feel upon first meeting someone as such. I made a note to message her, sensing something more in her than I felt towards the rest of the species. And so we started our journey together.
At that point in my life, I always held myself back. I never was invested in others, always standing back, and wearing the suit of armor I had made for myself. I made it a matter of personal pride to remark how I cared for no-one. I looked down on people. She changed that.
Shortly after we started talking, she was the one person I felt equal to, that I could relate with. At first, I had hoped to retreat fully from the world upon meeting her, encouraging her to believe as I did, as a protégé of sorts, and freeing myself of the guilt that would come from abandoning humanity to itself. She understood my anger and disappointment with the world, and sympathized with me. She never agreed, though. Where I could see no point in feeding the hungry, and healing the sick if they would only be that way again tomorrow, she was the opposite. ‘Do good where you can,’ she’d say, ‘help those who you are able.’ At the time, I thought she was naive, and more than a little crazy, but it’s funny how time and life can change someone.
The months rolled by. I began to have a real friend again, even if she was thousands of miles away. Through her, I met a group like us, social misfits who didn’t fit into societies neat little roles. We weren’t connected by much beyond that, and our shared chat room where we would come together. We became like a family to each other. We all had our demons, demons we didn’t try and hide. In truth, we were all wrecks in our own way, drifting through life and killing ourselves slowly. Somehow, by accepting each other for who we were, flaws and all, we were began to accept ourselves, as well. For the first time since isolating myself from the world, I began to have a sense of home, of family again. My parents had become.. passing figures in my life, pushed into the background in lieu of a world I was convinced I had chosen and desired.
Summer wasn’t exactly the model of a healthy human being. Between her own vast self-destructive habits, disease, and extreme susceptibility to finding herself injured, she had a lot working against her. While I wish I could her problems stopped there, they didn’t. I’m not sure I can honestly remember all the things that went wrong in her life while I knew her, and before.
When I first learned of the problems in her life, well, I don’t really know what I did. I didn’t care for others then, or at least, I still claimed not to, and I was completely unprepared for how to be a friend to someone who was hurting. In time, I would learn how to make her smile, how to brighten her day and provide whatever comfort an emotional robot is able.
Eventually, those walls started to come down. Brick by brick, just being her friend and wishing her the best, opened the blocks I had placed so fervently down. The armor melted away, and I was at a loss. Suddenly where there had been nothing before, there was feeling again. I began to not merely intellectualize my feelings, but I began to *feel* them. Slowly but surely, the world gained a vibrancy it had been lacking, with Summer at the center of it. Her happiness was enough to lift me out of anything, and her sadness had me crying right there with her.
As strange as it was to be able to say I cared for another, what happened next was even further from familiar for me.
“I love you.”
“What? You told me you didn’t even know what love was, how can you love me?”
“Well, according to the dictionary, I do...”
And just like that, this girl I had never seen in person, never heard her voice, had helped me to reconnect with something I had tried to lock away forever. She who had shown me nothing but kindness and compassion since I had known her. The first girl I ever had the courage to tell how I felt to. The first girl I’d ever felt more than a fleeting crush for.
And I invoke Webster.
Unsurprisingly, she laughed at me. Surprisingly, it worked. At least, it did eventually. After several months of trying to convince her, she relented. Not that she didn’t return the feelings, but rather, I think she was afraid of what it would mean, afraid of what she saw, as my eventual departure from her life. My utter lack of grace in telling her how I felt probably didn’t help things either.
The extent in which we understood each other scared me a little, and excited me more. With a few words we could make everything ok for the other, lift away the troubles of the world. Within seconds of saying hello to one another, we were able to tell if there was something wrong. That’s not the sort of thing that happens everyday, let alone simply by reading words on a screen. Though we had never seen one another, heard or touched each other, we had a bond with the other. I don’t claim to understand it, but I can’t deny it.
It was the most beautiful, the happiest time of my life. I believed that our feelings alone would be enough to make everything in our lives ok, that we could weather any storm as long as we held onto each other. Looking back, I suppose I had unrealistic expectations for us. Perhaps I went astray simply by having expectations. Regardless, that initial euphoria wore off far too soon, coming face to face with the reality of our lives, such as they were.
I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking at the time. I was fifteen, in love, and learning to crawl again in regards to my emotions and the human condition. Then again, that’s probably exactly why I did what I did.
Drawing upon my immense reserves of emotional strength I had built up inside myself, I vowed to be her shield against the world, as much as I could. When she fell, I would be there to catch her. When she was hurt, to tend to her words. I became her shoulder to cry on, her ear to whisper in. And there was much of all in the days and months to come.
I asked nothing in return for all of this. I was happy to help shoulder the burden of one I loved so dearly, happy to carry away all the pain I could if it even had a chance to brighten her day. There was no limit to how far I would go for her. The threads wove even tighter.
Eventually the months took their toll on me, and I felt the weight of her hurt sinking into my heart. The deeper I tried to draw it out of her, the more rushed in to fill the void. It seemed as though the world was trying to destroy us.
I spoke less and less of myself, and began to grow withdrawn again. In my recklessly selfless attempts to heal her, I didn’t wish to overburden her through worry of myself. The pain that grew deeper in my heart by the day was hidden from her, hidden from everyone. I told myself I could handle it, that I’d be ok. That my reserves were deep enough, that I didn’t have to let her suffer to save myself.
Eventually, it reached a point where I couldn’t deny the lie I was telling myself. I was worse off than I’d ever been in my life, and I knew that if I kept on it would only continue down this dark road I’d led myself upon, and death was my most likely end. The thing was, I didn’t trust anyone but myself to be able to help her. She didn’t have much to live for, and was taking medication for another of life’s cruel jokes thrown at her. I thought I was the only thing that could keep her going. So I made my promise to her.
“I will make your life better, or I will die trying.”
I had been given my chance to break free of the threads that bound me, and I had laughed in the face of it all. I loved her too damn much for there to be any other way. When I made that silent promise to her, I would never have expected both to come true.
What transpired over that next year is a blur, a blur which has left me irrevocably changed. Piecing together what happened then has been a long and slow process, one where many memories have been lost, much still hidden from me, locked away in the deepest recesses to protect me. I lost my mind, I lost reality, and I lost myself. The life that I had known was shattered, sacrificed on the altar of love, and eventually resurrected in it’s changed form.
I sank into a depression that had no end. Depression gave way to self-abandonment. Where before I longed for death, I no longer cared what happened to me. Death? Life? What did it matter, so long as it was somehow different. Emotions fell away. I longed to feel misery, some small measure of darkness in the void my life had become. I remember punching at walls, testing the waters of my emotion, trying to see if there was anything there. And as soon as I’d start, it was over. There was no anger coming, no sadness. Nothing but the slight numbing of my knuckles.
The hardest part of that, though, was when I could know longer feel the love I felt for her. It lasted the longest of all my feelings, growing ever weaker until it finally faded. But when it did fade, I was left with but a memory of why I I was doing what I was. Until one day, that memory too, would fade.
And still, I pressed on.
Disassociation grew. I think that there was some part of me, some self-preservation instinct that refused to go down quietly that was responsible for this. It locked me away from my own choices, protecting me from my own self-destructive path. It came on mild at first, washing away memories of unpleasant conversations and the pain I was still harboring for her. Yet as I pressed forward, it grew.
Eventually, I would not be able to tell my dreams from my waking states. The two intertwined and became one. I lost my memory of the time, and then my past. While before I at least had the pleasant nostalgia of my youth, and better times with her to retreat to, now I had nothing, nothing but the horror of my life as I had made it.
My senses numbed, everything lost it’s vibrancy. Life became like a shadow world, deprived of all that actually gave it life. My mind fell apart, unable to do anything but go through the basic motions of the day at the slowest possible speed.
And still, I pressed on.
I heard things that weren’t there. Or at least, I don’t really think they were. By this point, what was real and what wasn’t had become so hard to distinguish that it’s something of a crapshoot.
I remember going to the doctor once, though the reason escapes me. Along the lines, tests were done to address the increasing pains inside my body. There wasn’t any medical reason that could be found, but my body was shutting down. Slowly but surely, my organs were just.. turning off.
My body began to rebel. As if trying to sway me, to push me away from the path I was on, it would give out on me. A selective catatonia, if you will. Sometimes I would merely lose my ability to move my legs, and resort to crawling around or laying helpless on the ground. Sometimes I’d fall down stairs, and lay at the bottom wondering why I should get back up. And then, sometimes my whole body would refuse to move, where even moving my eyes took the entirety of my will to accomplish. There was something inside me telling me that it was time to return to myself, to tend my own wounds.
And still, I pressed on.
Eventually, in the midst of the haze and confusion that my life had become, I finally realized where I was, and where I was going. I remembered the promise that had led me to that moment, and the thousands of times I continued forward when every instinct in my body was yelling at me to turn around. I realized I had become so lost in myself, so trapped by what I created, that I had been unable to fulfill my promise. I’d been so ravaged by what I put myself through, that I’d forgotten everything. But I remembered then.
I remembered my promise. I didn’t know why I’d made it, not anymore. Nor did I remember what things like love even were. I didn’t know much of anything, other than this promise I made, and the knowledge that I had lost sight of it.
So I pressed on.
In my glimmer of consciousness, I had felt the weight of what I had done to myself, felt the changes I had inflicted. I knew there was no going back, that I had come too far. A thought came at me from the void. In all my life, I’ve never felt so strongly as I did on this one thing.
I am going to die.
That thought permeated my entire being. I knew it, I breathed it. The end to my eternity of nothingness was just around the corner. I reveled in the idea, as much as is possible for one such as that. Finally, what I had longed for, to be free of this self-imposed hell, would be upon me. The truth was, at that point, I already considered myself dead, and had for what had felt like an eternity, but then, in an eternity, it all feels so long. Or perhaps I should say, I considered myself the undead. I was alive, but only physically, and even that was growing weaker by the day. Soon, that last flame would die out, and my body would finally give me rest.
I never had any hopes or dreams that anything would happen to me when the moment of final death came to me. I expected nothingness. I couldn’t have cared less, though, as I’d *lived* nothingness, and there was no way that being fully dead in it could be any worse.
So I pressed on.
In the name of a promise I could barely recall, I pressed on. In the name of a word whose meaning I had forgotten, I pressed on. In the vaguest of memories for one who had once mattered so dearly, I pressed on. I wrote my final goodbyes to this world, to those who had known me. Provided words that I hoped they’d understand, that could explain in some way why I was lost to this world.
I came back into her life, though how long we had been apart I had no idea. I couldn’t escape her, for she was always in my dreams, always in my head, and she was as real to me there as she ever was. I apologized for leaving, and told her I would stay as long as I could. I wanted to give her as much as I possibly could before I shuffled off this mortal coil completely, to give her a chance at the better life I always knew she deserved. That last remnant of strength that I held inside me, I was laying with the rest upon the altar of love.
“I’ve found someone else. I’m sorry.”
Even lost in the void as I was, I felt it hit. It was done, then. I was no longer needed, a remnant of a life she had left behind somewhere when I had left myself behind. I didn’t blame her. How could I? Even if I didn’t still love her so deeply-- I knew that somewhere, somehow, I loved her-- even if I didn’t want only her happiness, she was right. I had lost myself, and she’d lost me when that happened. Now that I finally found myself again, she had already found her own measure of happiness, one that wouldn’t leave her all too soon.
It wasn’t long before we stopped speaking entirely. I suppose there wasn’t much left to say at that point. I wasn’t the person she had loved anymore, and she couldn’t be the person I had loved. Still loved.
So this is it, huh? Hell, might as well go down swinging.
I turned that one, final spark inwards. That spark that love had spared, hidden away in the deepest place inside me, and let it lose upon myself. I don’t really know what I was expecting, to be honest. I suppose I wanted to try and give life one last hurrah, soak in whatever small measure of happiness and beauty I could in what fleeting time I had. I knew I couldn’t ever go back-- that world was gone. I know, I destroyed it.
Somehow, that spark took hold. It set off a chain reaction in me, and soon, life. With every breath I took, I was more alive than the last. I was experiencing the world for the first time. Soon, emotions. And not just misery and depression, but real joy. Laughter from my soul. I reached out to everything I could, everything I had wanted to do but had forsaken.
I made friends. People I could see, face to face. I got outside. Spirituality took root. Meditation. Horseback riding. Courting, dating, relationships-- outside this electronic box. Every step I took was one step closer to my salvation. The humble spark had grown to become an inferno.
I started to live my life.
But I’m not the same person I was. Not by a long shot. Oh, sure, there are similarities. If you don’t look that hard, or never saw both sides, you might never notice. But a simple glance beneath the surface will say otherwise. I care. I love. Cynicism has been replaced by hope, pessimism with optimism. Anger, with love. Everything that had been good in Summer, I’ve made a point to hold within me. She was the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, and I wanted to honor that by bringing that beauty she had shown me into the world around me. Of course, that wasn’t really that hard to do.. somewhere in that process, who she was, and who I am, merged.
That life I led before.. has long seemed like another person. That I’m the spiritual successor to someone who I know a lot about, but never really knew. As time has gone by, I’ve been able to see the line of who he was, and who I am, and how that has stayed the same throughout. I’ve also slowly begun to unlock our memories, hidden as they were. With each one, understanding a little more of how I’ve come to find myself here, how he found himself where he did.
I’ve also come to the belief that what happened then, everything in my life led to. Not merely how our lives always lead us to this moment here and now, but when I look back, I can see a chain stretching, countless tiny links ensuring that the pattern play out as it was supposed to, as it still is. In another life, I suppose I’d chalk it up to coincidence, or my mind making up what it wants to see. But he led me here, and I have seen too much proof of the pattern to believe in anything else.
This is the story of how I was born.