2.1.53

Chapter Four : One day alive

What will you do on the last day of your life? Some people will go on a one-day crazy adventure maybe go paragliding or scuba diving, maybe spend it with their partner or perhaps their family, or maybe lay on their bed until they breathe their last. Maybe they will indulge in relieving the taste of the food they had with their partner, or drive through the path where they went for their first long drive, maybe dance in the rain in their favorite song, maybe have their last kiss or give their most affectionate hug. Some might burn their diaries, some might write everything down just to leave their thoughts behind.

It wasn't the first time I was wondering about this specific question. I asked Prinita once about this.

"I will call my loved ones and spend some time with my family and you. Will watch all my artworks for the last time and click a big smiling selfie for you to keep it safely" She said and hugged me a little more tightly that night.

She then asked me what I would do. To which I replied I would have sex with her but it was not the truth. In fact I hadn't even thought about it back then. I had everything I dreamt of. I was a successful author, a proud boyfriend of the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I had everything in my life, back then I just wanted to live and live and live some more.

But all through that night I kept on wondering about the selfie part. Not that her taking enormous amounts of photos of herself was alarming but why with a smile?

Maybe because she wanted me to not be so sad after she died? Maybe because she wanted me to remember her in her happiness and not in her pain?

But I didn't get a clear answer to that question. At least not until the night before when I ordered my own death to some shady website I found on the internet.

I couldn't sleep after that and emptied the half whiskey bottles that I could find in the wine cabinet, blacked out a couple of times and kept on asking myself the question, "How should I spend the last day of being alive?"

When daylight hit my eyes, I was hungover, but somehow my body still had strength left in it. I put on a batch of coffee and rushed to the nearby 24x7 store and bought myself half a dozen of my favorite sandwich. I needed something in my body. I devoured all of them and the entire pot of coffee. The clock was ticking 6am.

I was awake and still alive. I wondered how will they end my life? Shoot me right between the eyes or maybe with a deadly blow of a karate champion, or maybe a swift knife cut across my throat. But they said it will be peaceful, so perhaps in a way in which I will feel nothing, maybe in my sleep or something so fast that I can't even react.

I logged on to the security camera installed in the front of my house in an attempt to look out for suspicious vehicles or persons but at that hour there were some joggers and few other elderly people.

I still had the entire day or at least until the deed is done. It was my last day of being alive.

"What will you do in your last day? why Prinita mentioned the smile?" the questions kept on running but I knew the answer.

Because when we know we are going to die, we start appreciating the smallest of things. Appreciate that we are alive at that very second. Sadness, regrets, guilts are swept away, there remains no invading thoughts or any negative feelings inside us. The air around us becomes appreciable, the couch, the shoes and the utensils, everything becomes something to be appreciated or be grateful about. All the things in life and life becomes the most important. And we smile for the last time that day because deep down we know there remains nothing of the past nor the future, just that moment of being alive.

So, I decided to appreciate all the moments of being alive. I wanted to schedule message for Prinita but I decided not to let her thoughts consume me.

I started cleaning the drawing room, then the kitchen and cleaned the rest of the house. Send all my drafts to the publisher and scheduled a resignation letter to my boss. Ordered lunch from my favorite restaurant and watched a few episodes of my favorite show.

Death. The great nothing. What will I feel after I die? I was not religious enough to believe in heaven or hell but if there were one, I was definitely going to hell.

Some part of me was contemplating against my decision. What if I give life a new chance? A new identity in a new town, or a different country altogether. Stop being a writer and fulfil my dream of starting a café. But then I remembered that it was a dream I shared with Prinita and then I remembered her lips on that stranger's lips. How happy she was looking and all my decisions seemed to be justified.

I opened my phone and deleted all her messages first, scrolled through all her photos and kept on deleting one after another. My storage was filled with her photos, photos of her smiling, photos of her eating, photos of her just sitting on the couch with her hair tied in a bun, photos of her struggling to move the heavy coffee table for cleaning and photos of us, in vacation, in a restaurant, in her cousin's weeding, of us kissing, of us making awkward faces. I deleted them all. They stopped belonging to me.

She was perhaps counting days of belonging with someone else and I was counting hours before I leave forever. There were tears in my eyes and a little pain inside me. But it was tolerable or perhaps I was just tolerating it because I didn't have much time left.

I stayed there on my bed facing the window, watching the sun set and the street lights kicking in power. The lights in my room lit up as well but I ordered the virtual home assistant to turn it off.

I remember writing a series of short writings named "She, God" and during a podcast the host asked me if I really thought my partner as my God. I told the host the truth. I put her in a pedestal that was above everything else. I put my faith in her as if she will save me from everything.

And when your savior turns away from you, your soul gets broken into pieces that you keep on destroying yourself. You keep on destroying until you look in the mirror and not recognize the figure staring back at you.

I got up and ordered to turn back the lights on. I stood before the mirror in the bed room and I almost forgot when the last time was I looked at myself all alone and not have Prinita by my side. I was not a self-caring person, Prinita used to love taking care of me. She used to advise me how I should dress for an interview, tie my hairs that I have been growing for a year just to look more like a writer, sometimes we used to do weird and funny and cheesy things right before the mirror, she loved clicking mirror selfies and I loved photobombing her. But all that remains is me alone or rather the shell of me in front of the mirror.

I kept on staring until I knew what to do. I punched it with all my might, the glass smashing into pieces. Some pieces fell in the floor with a noise, some piercing the skin of my hand. The blood was flowing but my hand didn't hurt, maybe nothing hurt anymore.

The mirror was broken, each piece reflecting myself to me, each piece showing a disfigured and incomplete portion of me. Maybe it was who I am. Maybe I am disfigured and incomplete.

I couldn't stare at it anymore. I went to the bathroom, grabbed a pair of tweezers and carefully pulled out the pieces of glass jabbed in my skin when I heard my doorbell.

It was not a usual time for anyone to come so I pulled the front camera feed on my phone. It was a man with sunglasses and a big hat. The camera had a speaker so I unmuted the microphone and said into it rather rudely, "Who is it? What do you want?"

The person looked into the camera and said in a polite tone, "Sir your order has arrived"