Rekindle

24

If I thought about it too much, I screamed until my throat was sore. Out of fear instead of grief though. And if I thought about it too little, I eventually had to think about it more, and so the cycle repeated. I was going to die. I was truly going to die.

There's always something in a human that won't let it go down without a fight. Antibodies and white blood cells and infections are always at war. Scabs happen. Scars heal up. Cells fight to live. Organs don't fail easily. There's just always some physical effort out of our control being put into keeping us alive, no matter how much we might want to die. Even if I jumped from a building, my body would make a last-ditch effort to save me. Even when bleeding out, or in excruciating pain, a body doesn't just quit. Never does. Mentality might. I might want to die, but my body, my home would never burn itself to the ground without being forced. Humans have such extraordinary limits.

And I wanted to break them.

I wanted to sprint past those limits. I wanted to make my body want to shut down. I desired to make it quit trying, quit converting oxygen and stop pumping blood, halt every basic function it had ever known. I knew when I would die, I knew it'd be all over in a day anyway, but my body would keep living for those twenty-four hours, and I just didn't fucking want it to. I had one day. One day left, and my body was determined to run right up until the execution would occur. I could wish death upon myself with every ounce of willpower and desperation, but my body wouldn't stop. It wouldn't do that to me. It couldn't.

You know, it's a very funny feeling, knowing the date of your death. Everything is quite serene. I started to take a liking to all the little individual carpet fibers and found overwhelming tranquility in nature; every inanimate object was there for me, silently cheering me on. It's nice. It's quiet. I knew it was all over, I knew I wouldn't see tomorrow and that was okay. I wondered if it was what Asher thought before jumping.

I had never been religious, but if there was an afterlife, I'd want to meet up. Talk about things. Know why he did it. He'd probably be mad I followed suit, but we'd be together, as sadistic as it sounds. Only if there was an afterlife, however, and assuming neither of us was going to hell.

"Both of us are going to hell, sweetheart. I just got my ticket earlier."

Maybe everything just stopped. I stopped existing and everything was done, right then, right there. Show over, story completed. They say you die twice: once when your heart stops, and another when your name is spoken for the last time. Point being the only record of you would be what impression you left on other people. In their memories, in passing conversation past your death. For me, everyone I'd marked was gone. I would not live as a martyr. I would die twice when my heart pumped its last pump. Was that worse to think about than an imaginary afterlife?

I supposed the disappointment is what would scare people. Most of the population has had that little concept of heaven implanted into their minds since birth, and to refuse it was what made it terrifying. To refuse what seemed like the obvious truth was like trying to sign a will with a non-dominant hand. Ah, if someone had just told me at a young age what happened on the surface, I wouldn't be so conflicted. "When you die, you will stop thinking and existing. There's nowhere else to go." That would've been nice.

The thought tweaked a memory, a saying I heard once before. "You can't strip the human being of being human." Ah. It's a nice saying, am I right? How lovely to think I can never lose myself, not truly, not with every merciless scrape of a villain's chisel against my body. I could never lose myself. The old, sociopathic and insane Lacey had lied to me; I had control. In my final hours I had control, because my thoughts and emotions were my own and no one could change them without my permission. I just only realized it in the face of death.