What is life? What is death? What is it to be born? What is it to die? Will your life make a difference to the world? Will your death make a difference to the world? Are we dying to live or are we living to die? Two entities that are so inextricably entwined that they are indistinguishable. Both are equally strong and both are equally beautiful. Well that's at least how I see it.
Some people say before you die your brain lets out a last burst of energy like the last gasp of a dying pair of lips or the last echo of a falling stone. People say, that during this time, people see their life flash before their eyes. Everything they were, everything they are, everything they could be, compressed into a minute number of seconds. Some people say you see god, beckoning you into your chosen afterlife. They are wrong. They see me. You see, the human body lives to die, it is the fate of every single living organism on the face of the planet and the fate of everyone to come. It is the primary goal of all of us. We are not destined to live forever, if anyone would, it would be a malfunction of life. If you live you are going to die and if you die you are going to have lived. The burst of life that can be studied by scientists at the moment of someone's death is the feeling of euphoria the body feels in seeing me. Very few people on our planet would wish for death, most of us want to cling to life with every being in our bodies but in reality, a body wants to die. It wants to serve its purpose that it was built for and make room for more people to live and more people to die. Would I say I like my job? Well that's a difficult question, I feel that helping a soul out of this world, is just as beautiful as bringing one in. Both can be painful and lengthy affairs but the means of both justify the ends. But sometimes we want to leave before our time and this is the story about the time where I, for the only time in my entire existence, talked to one of my few admirers.
I sat on the side of the bath and watched the tall, skinny boy stare at the box of sleeping pills in front of him. He had been calling for me for little over a month now but had not yet made the move that would summon me. Normally I never get involved with their lives but I knew this one was different. It was my fate to involve myself with his life, just as much it was his fate, to be involved with mine. I had watched this boy before and knew he had reasons to be staring at a pack of sleeping pills at 10:30 on a Sunday night. He had long stopped feeling like a person and more of a hollow shell breathing into the emptiness of life. He couldn't pinprick the minute where he had started to feel like this, it had been more of a gradual downward slope that had lead him to this predicament. He, who had once been a happy, young boy, full of the expectations of what he felt, life owed him, had began to waste away. It had started when he had hit puberty, a trying time in for any adolescent. His friends had moved in a blur around him, getting drunk, kissing girls, having sex, while he stood in the middle, surrounded by life but made lonely by death. The laughs and smiles that passed his lips in other people's company were shadows of past happiness that he no longer felt. He had began to disappear. At first friends would phone him and ask where he was and that everyone had missed him last night but after numerous no-shows, they too forgot about him. Months had passed and he knew he was barely there, merely the twilight of a dying day. Only the air around him knew of his existence and that to was beginning to leave him. He was in an empty forest on his own and he knew when he finally fell, nobody would hear him make a sound. But he was wrong. I knew of him and in the greatest depths of his emptiness I had been there watching him. You see no one is truly alone when you still occupy a place on this earth and now here I was watching him stare at the pack of sleeping pills from my place on the side of the bathtub. That was when I for the first time in my existence I used my voice.
"This is not your time,” I said. The boy turned around slowly and with dark, unwavering eyes stared at me. He looked neither scared nor upset to see me, although he knew exactly who I was. I looked deep into those eyes right into the darkness of his soul and said "This is not the time or the place of when your death is going to take place" and then I did something else I have never done before, I told him. I told him what his life was going to be like, I told him of the highs the lows. The first kisses and the last. The people who would come, the people who would go and the people who would change everything. The wonders he would see and the terrors he would have. The name of the girl he would marry and that of his first child. The fights he would win and those he was destined to lose. I told him of the immeasurable happiness he was bound to have and how he could rise out of the depths of the most unfathomable sadness. I basically told him life by death.
That was the story where for the first and only time in my existence, I talked to one of my admirers and lit a light of life in the eyes of death. I do not say I enjoy my job but there are times where I am infinitely grateful of the powers I hold and when his time did come, he too felt the feeling of euphoria when seeing me, as I lovingly beckoned him out of life and into death.
