I Try

Chapter 20 - Tomorrow

Unknown

Would you rather die letting everyone believe that you’re an awful human being and spare them the grief, or die with the truth out and let them suffer?

I had a decision to make. 

56 Days Later

October 26th, 2013

1 Hour Before the Wedding

Sometimes, when faced with a near-death experience, or in my case, a definite impending death experience, it’s said that your life flashes before your eyes. Pretty cliche, if you ask me, but of course, not many people who’ve had them lived to speak about it, or if they did, cared much to relive it. 

But, the special case that I am, I have the unique opportunity to share it. 

With the cool metal gun pressed to my temple, it was hard to think of anything except the eyes of the one person who’s clouded my thoughts over and over again. And not just because, with a deadly weapon pointed at your brain, things tend to get murky. 

I used to believe that people, in general, were a doomed race. We walk this Earth, dying the minute we begin to live. Our concepts of creation, damnation, salvation are flawed at best. We destroy the things we touch and unintentionally mark what we want to preserve. 

In short, humans, as a whole, are morons. I, being one of these morons, never felt the need to join the ranks pairing up, procreating, and leaving descendants in our midst. It seemed rather pointless. 

Yet, as the reality of the ironically mortal end was thrust in front of me, I found that I was incapable of being less than human. Because I did love someone, because that someone dominated my decisions for the better part of a year, because I loved the person I would leave behind so very much, my final hour, counted down by the clock over the mantle, was not in vain. 

You’d think that facing an ironclad end would want for pleading, for desperate attempts at alternatives. I would have thought so, too, if I had been the one sitting safely somewhere, quietly living out my days, of which I knew not the exact number. 

I’m here to tell you that when your soul meets its Earthly demise, it does not always clamor for survival. Mine didn’t. 

I knew that my time had expired and I chose not to go without dignity, but with it and the knowledge that my death would save the lives of the people that I loved. That, to me, was far more important than any subsidiary existence I could savor if I didn’t allow this to happen. 

Kill or be killed. 

Personally, neither option greatly outweighed the other. Kill: to cause the death of. To live an existence that knew the evils it took to murder another person was unfathomable. Even metaphorically, as in, take what you want or have it taken from you, was a bitter portrayal of corporate America.