unspeakable | jegulus

your fine spiderweb is fastening my ankle to a stone

chapter title: so long, marianne by leonard cohen

tw: suicide attempt, allusions to past SA

When you think about death often enough, it stops feeling like an unfortunate inevitability waiting around at the periphery of a life. It ceases to frighten you. The idea of living becomes an object of fear and abjection. Death becomes a seducer. Living becomes pure terror. All of that suffering, all of that misery, that veneer of livability, that stupid hope that one day you won't feel like this anymore even though every sign inside of you, every sign in your past, every sign in your blood and your memory points to you here again, with a knife in your hands stained with your own blood and sunlight burning the exhaustion out of your eyes.

When you think about death often enough, it becomes something warm and soothing. It becomes kind. It opens its arms to you, the sweetness on its lips like the sweetness and temptation of the devil. Death whispers: It'll be so easy when I have you, let me keep you, let me hold you. I'll be gentle, I'll be sweeter than life has ever been, I'll be generous with my emptiness everywhere life is cruel with hers. Death beckons to you with a crooked finger if you invite him to peer over your shoulder at life too often. Death points at the ugliest places inside of you and forces you to see the pattern swirling toward him, to the bottom, to the whirlpool of inescapable poison in your heart, in all of the intensity of loathing and nothingness and fear.

Death holds your fear in soft hands and extends his touch to you with a look into the bottom of your soul, the fathomless places where pain is sharpest. Death says, isn't now as good a time as any? What can the future offer you that isn't pain? Life tells you it will get better eventually, but the opposite is equally true. The evidence paints a clear picture... if you're not lying to yourself, if you're being honest, if you're paying attention, if you're clever enough to see it.

The truth is, it will get bad again.

It will get bad, and then it will get worse than it has ever been before, in ways you cannot yet fathom, and you will look back here to see my shadow looming over your memory and wish you took my hand now, before the world tarnishes your soul even more. Look at the bloodstains, Death implores. You cannot unlive this. You cannot take it back. You cannot forget what you've done. You cannot forget what you are trying not to remember even now. You will look back one day and wish you died here and now, before you felt what you will feel. You will feel pain unimaginable to you as you are now, and you will regret refusing me.

Give up, he whispers. Let me hold you. Rest. There is no hope for a better future. There will be good, but the pain will come again. All happiness is temporary. All happiness is illusory. I will always be there for you when the sun vanishes again. I will always be holding your shoulder, whispering in your ear, and beating inside of your stubborn heart.

Don't you wish you died the last time you held yourself halfway off of the edge of that building? Don't you wish you died with what was left of the gentleness you had before you wasted it?

James remembered being in that tower that night with Regulus, not even truly intending to die, just trying to control him, terrified and grasping for anything to hold ransom to keep him in check, that frightening boy he kept forgetting how to love. With every fibre of his being, every drop of blood in his body, everything he was, he wished he had done it then. He wished he had taken that little step over the edge before he knew what this kind of pain felt like.

He'd heard over and over again how people regretted suicide attempts as soon as they decided to go through with their plan, whatever that plan may be, the regret was invariable. People like to talk about people who jump off of bridges and live, and how glad they always claim to be that they're alive when they survive by some "miracle," but he'd never heard anyone talk about this.